JavaGeek.org - Linux category

In need of an internal IM server? Try Wildfire

Wed, 21 Dec 2005 00:09:16 GMT

At work, we use an IM server from Microsoft that uses the Windows Messenger app as a client, and only works for internal communications. Since last week and for reasons unknown, the server is not responding (the person in charge didn't reply to my emails). As a group of developers separated by geography, IM tools are a must-have. That got me thinkning, isn't there an easy alternative that we can use? what about a XMPP (Jabber) server installed on a linux development environment, and some jabber-compatible client?

Well, after a quick search I found a very good XMPP Server, which by chance is made in Java (OK, not by chance. I chose it precisely because of this reason). Wildfire IM Server (Formerly Jive Messenger) is an ideal solution for us, since its small, free, and most of all, has support for LDAP-based accounts, which means we can use it with our LDAP-enabled development server (I'll post later how I set up the server to use LDAP for things like unix shell, svn access, etc.).

In less than 15 minutes I got Wildfire set up to use MySQL as the Database for storing data, and LDAP for authentication. Instantly every developer that has access to the development environment is now able to connect to the IM server, and it even shows the LDAP groups for the different projects.

I just saw how Wildfire was profiled to improve performance, and I'm sure it will get faster (not to mention better) as they move forward. Now I only need to pitch it to upper management in hopes of replacing the old IM server.

If it's good enough for Linus...

Tue, 13 Dec 2005 14:30:24 GMT

On the Gnome Usability mailing list, Linus Torvalds replied to a mail from Till Kamppeter asking about PPD options removed from the printing dialog, by actively saying that he (Linus) encourages everyone to switch or use KDE. He then goes to criticize Gnome developers as 'interface Nazis', which care more about dumbing down the user interface than they care about implementing new features.

I personally have been using KDE since 1.x, and I've always preferred it to Gnome, but time to time I come in contact with Gnome, mainly because the distribution I'm testing comes with Gnome by default (like Ubuntu, which I tested last month). And I've seen how features that were in one release suddenly disappear in the following one. And I don't mean the are hidden in an 'advanced' mode. They simply just aren't there anymore. It is really a shame that many popular projects are using Gnome (or GTK+, rather) as their windows toolkit, like Firefox (which by the way, just released 1.5) or even Eclipse.

It's good to hear other people say they prefer KDE, but when it comes from the guy who invented the Linux kernel, my respect for KDE just went up a couple of notches (My respect for Gnome is already too low to lose points). I saw this story at OSNews (sent to me by a friend).

Switched Linux Distribution... Again

Wed, 02 Nov 2005 16:37:05 GMT

After playing with Ubuntu for a while, I decided it was time to test another Linux distribution. This time, I went with OpenSuSE 10.0. As always, installation wasn't a problem. In less than 25 minutes I had my system up and running. I liked the fact that opensuse, after installing, takes you directly to the login screen. No reboot required. It's been a while since I installed Windows XP on a machine, but I remember at least a couple of reboots to get my system installed.

Among one of the nicest features of opensuse is the fact that installing FreeNX is a breeze. And it works really good. I just wish I could 'detach' from a session, so I can return to the same session later.

The OSS version of SuSE does not include Java support on the installation CDs, but it's just a matter of adding a repository to the YaST installer to get Java. I installed Java 1.5 and Eclipse 3.1 with no problems.

Administration is somewhat different from other distributions. For example, they provide 'rcscripts', which are just links to the real scripts on /etc/init.d/. At first I found this a little odd, but now I got accustomed to them.

The only thing that I would change is the addition of sudo support, just like Ubuntu. In Ubuntu, you don't have to use a root account (in fact, you usually don't assign a password to root) but instead rely on sudo to do everything. The first account you set up has root sudo privileges, and you only need the password for the user to execute something as root. I hope more distributions chose this route.

I have yet to test my full set of hardware, but I'm sure I'll have little troubles.