Development Cycle

For years Internet Explorer 6 was the bane of every web developers life but as with all great tales it seems the characters change but the story always remains the same. While IE6 is generally not expected to be catered for by developers these days its equally twisted offspring IE7 still is. Normally when I run need to test or fix Internet Explorer issues I  just boot up a XP virtual machine and try and replicate what ever dramas the end user is experiencing. But the other day I was away from my normal desktop with no copy of Windows handy so running a VM wasn’t an option.

For years I used rely on the ies4linux project to get IE running under Linux project to get Internet Explorer working for me, but unfortunately the project no longer seems that active so a new way had to be found. Luckily I found it can be done through wine tricks which is actually easier than the original method.

So here I will run you through the process of installing Internet Explorer 7 on your Ubuntu box with Wine this way you can still manage some basic testing without having to worry about getting a complete copy of Windows.First up make sure your system has Wine & Winetracks installed:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install wine1.2 winetricks

If you look under your applications menu you should now have a Wine subfolder with an entry called “Winetricks” click on this this to get started.

Select the option labelled “Install a Windows DLL or component”.

Then select your chosen version of Internet Explorer to install, be warned though don’t get greedy and try an install them all under the same Wine prefix as they wont play together nicely.

Form here it should be pretty smooth sailing just accept the EULA which you are breaking by installing on Linux and you should be good to go!

At the end it will say you need a reboot just hit the “Restart now” option, it won’t actually reboot your system Wine will simply simulate a reboot for it. After the process completes simply run:

wine ‘C:\Program Files\Internet Explorer\iexplore’

For a somewhat buggy but “good enough” version of Internet Explorer on your Ubuntu box.

Ever wanted real time backups of  directories on your server? To replicate static media files for a website to a separate box to reduce load? An easy solution lays with lsyncd it allows you to watch a directory structure on your file system, and replicate any changes on a remote system.

How It Works:
inotify is a Linux subsystem available from the 2.6.13 release of the Linux kernel that monitors changes made to a file system and reports these changes to interested applications. lsyncd is an application written in lua that uses the inotify service to inform it of changes made to monitored directories and then when notified of a change uses rsync to replicate the changes on a remote service.

Getting lsyncd
The lsyncd sourcecode can be downloaded from Google Code and compiled but depending on the distribution your server is running, the install process be even easier as lsyncd is included in the repositories of many popular Linux distros.

Installing On Debian / Ubuntu
While lsyncd is included in both the repositories of Debian and Ubuntu but unfortunately its an outdated version so check what version you are going to get beforehand with the command:

apt-cache show lsyncd

If apt-cache tells you that only one of the 1.x versions are available, I would recommend grabbing one of the 2.x versions from the Debian testing repository instead, the amd64 package can be found here  and one for the i386 architecture here. Then install using the dpkg command i.e

cd /root
wget wget http://ftp.au.debian.org/debian/pool/main/l/lsyncd/lsyncd_2.0.4-1_amd64.deb
apt-get install lua5.1 rsync
dpkg -i lsyncd_2.0.4-1_amd64.deb

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Outside of internal networks bandwidth is paid often for by the gigabyte and as such it becomes important to be able to see the bandwidth consumption of machines and plan future quotas accordingly as usage grows. There are plenty of packages available that fill this void like darkstat, ntop etc, but they tend to be overkill in a lot of situations were you don’t need pretty graphs you just want to know how much data is entering and leaving an interface.  Enter vnStat a simple console based tool that allows you to monitor traffic flow to and from interfaces on your servers.
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Wireframing is an invaluable technique when starting the development of a new project, both to set functionality expectations with project stake holders and to give the build team a concrete idea of what it is exactly they have to build. There are plenty of web based and commercial packages available but I don’t really do enough wireframing to justify the cost of an ongoing subscription to a web based service and not many of the commercial packages cater to the Linux market. I have always loved Dia ( http://live.gnome.org/Dia ) for creating flow charts and work flow diagrams but never really found it suited to the creation of wireframes.

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Since its release on April 28th Natty Narwhal (11.04) seems to have gained it fair share of haters. The Unity interface is a huge change to the UI and in most peoples experience its buggy and doesn’t seem ready for the prime time.

No issue I thought after I upgraded I will just use the “Ubuntu Classic” option at login until the new Unity interface matures, unfortunately whilst coding in Eclipse earlier today I noticed using the classic interface or not some issues are still there. I was looking at a wide piece of code in Eclipse and started to become alarmed, what the hell has happened to my editors scroll bars?

I didn’t really pick up on the missing vertical scroll straight away as the scroll wheel on the mouse still got me where I was headed without issue, but I was left without any easy way to browse to the far right if the code was wider than the display area.

I am told the scroll bars are supposed to appear when the mouse hovers in their vicintiy although this doesn’t seem to happen when using Eclipse at present. Luckily it seems pretty easy to fix, I just wrote a 3 line bash file that gives me back the classic scroll bars I have come to love.

Simply saved the file made it executable with:

Updated my menu and desktop shortcuts to point to my script rather than directly to the Eclipse executable, restarted the application and thankfully problem solved!

The latest release of the popular browser Firefox is now here with Firefox 4.0 boasting speed improvements, location aware browsing, improved HTML 5 support plus much more. Getting Firefox 4 for your Ubuntu desktop is pretty simple using the mozilla team PPA.

To get started open a terminal and enter:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:mozillateam/firefox-stable

Potential Issue: depending on your network, corporate firewalls often block Port 11371, which is used to communicate with the key server causing timeouts. If this happens to you the key can be downloaded over port 80 using the command:

sudo gpg –keyserver hkp://keyserver.ubuntu.com:80 –recv-keys CE49EC21

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade

Close Firefox if its currently running and open again and enjoy your new look browsing experience.

Downloading youtube videos to your local machine for offline veiwing is easily on Ubuntu 10.10 with the youtube-dl utility.

Simply open a terminal window and execute:

apt-get update
apt-get install youtube-dl

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If your like me it annoys you that your desktop keeps messing with your CPU speeds when all you wan’t is performance. Fortunately its easy enough to fix.

Open a terminal windows and execute:

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get install rcconf

(Chances are you may already have the rcconf installed.)

sudo rcconf

Scroll down the list of services till you find the service labelled “Ondemand”, this is the service that controls the CPU scaling. Unselect the option and hit Ok to exit, now when you reboot your system should run at full speed all the time.

The newest Long Term Support (LTS) version of the Ubuntu distro labelled Lucid Lynx was released earlier today. This release is packed with new packages and enhancements, making me keen to try it out. Not being brave enough to gamble with my current desktop machine running Karmic Koala I decided to download the .iso and play with it in a virtual machine first to give me a feel of what to expect.

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The day has finally come and the latest release of Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty Jackalope) is available for download.

So Whats Been Improved?

• Easier configuration of multiple monitor setups
• A number of video cards now have free drivers available
• Significantly faster boot up times
• Support for the ext4 filesystem
• Improved range of wireless and 3g devices supported
• Intelligent switching between wireless and 3g connections
• The server version comes with Eucalyptus, allowing you to play with cloud computing before paying money for the likes of Amazon’s ec2

Can I Upgrade From 8.10?

Sure, just press the ALT & F2 keys, in the dialog box that appears type update-manager -d.This should open up the update manager which will tell you a new release is available. To get the ball rolling simply press the upgrade button the next screen will show you the realease notes for Jaunty. Press the upgrade button down the bottom of this screen and the system will go have a look at what pakages it needs to complete the upgrade.

If no issues are found a window will eventually pop up asking you if you would like to start the upgrade. Pressing the “start upgrade” button on this dialog box will then start the upgrade in earnest downloading all the packages it needs and then installing them. Be forewarned the actual upgrade can take a long time especially if you have a slow connection or are not getting great speeds from you mirror of choice.

When the process is done you will be asked if you want to remove any obsolete packages, just click the “remove” button to continue . The next dialog box will inform you the system requests a restart, click the “restart now” button and wave goodbye to Intrepid Ibex and hello Jaunty Jackalope. Upon restart if you want to be absolutely sure you didn’t get short changed open up a terminal and type sudo lsb_release -a, you will be told what version of Ubuntu you are currently running in the output.

Links

Ubuntu

Kubuntu

The Ubuntu Forums

Ubuntu 9 Tweets