About Time Linux (AbTLinux)

Suspending AbTLinux project indefinitely

2009-12-30T09:56:00.000+01:00

Indefinitely, it sounds like forever but not quite. I have not been able to put any time into this project over the last year (last code commit 380 days ago...) so I need to be realistic.

I have moved on to other things as one does over time. Maybe someone will want to pick up this project and move on, just give me a shout.

Thanks to those that put time in on design, discussions, and reviewing my coding. I will always be hanging out on #abtlinux at irc.freenode.net.

Moved back to sourceforget.net

2008-12-04T08:48:00.000+01:00

The fine people at assemba.com have moved their company forward and implemented a business model that includes payment for using their more advanced features. I don't want to get locked into anything that might require removal of my project, so even though they continue to maintain free hosting for open source projects I have decided to migrate back to the original sourceforge.net infrastructure.

The main website links have been migrated, soon I will be updating the content in the wiki, tracker and such.

Return values in Ruby, where are they?

2008-12-02T21:06:00.002+01:00

It really bothers me that code can become unclear or obscure by not communicating very simple facts, like what a method is returning. A good practice used in Java is to return a 'results', meaning one keeps the return value of a method stored in a variable named 'results'. It can be a String, Boolean, or whatever.

Ruby is one of my favorite languages right now, but handles return values for methods very differently than languages like Java. Ruby does not require an explicit 'return' statement, but can return the last executed statement results by default. This can be confusing.

Discovering what this return value might be can be more time consuming that is necessary and is immediately taken care of by simply supplying a 'return' statement. Cost is nothing, results are clarity. I provide an example from this project:


##
# Cleans up this packages source build directory.
#
# RETURNS:  boolean - True if the completes successfully,
# otherwise false.
##
def remove_build
  puts "Removings build..."
  if ($REMOVE_BUILD_SOURCES)
      buildSourcesLocation = "#{$BUILD_LOCATION}/#{srcDir}"
       
      if (!File.directory?(buildSourcesLocation))
        return true
      end

      if (!FileUtils.rm_rf buildSourcesLocation, :verbose => true )
        return false
      end
  end
   
  return true
end

* This is a cross post.

AbTLinux infrastructure downtime on Halloween

2008-10-30T11:24:00.000+01:00

Assembla servers will be down tomorrow, October 31, starting at 8:00 UTC, for a database upgrade. We expect the outage will last about 40 minutes.

www.assembla.com and subversion services will be off during this time.

Users in North America will not feel much affect, because it will be very early in the morning – 4:00 AM. However, this will affect users in Europe and Asia.

AbTLinux has a gcc build!

2008-10-08T22:03:00.000+02:00

It is a small thing, but one of the very core packages that will be needed to call this distribution a thing born of GNU Software is GCC. Today I got this package to build using our very immature abt package manager (v0.3)!

I know it is a small victory, but hey, I take them where I can get them. My install list is growing, here is a preview output of the 'show-installed' command:

Installed AbTLinux packages:

Package          Version         Installed
=========================================================
gawk            3.1.6            Sat Sep 27 12:24:27 2008
findutils       4.4.0            Mon Sep 22 21:49:55 2008
sed               4.1.5            Mon Sep 22 20:53:02 2008
tar                1.20             Mon Sep 22 21:20:00 2008
bzip2           1.0.5            Mon Sep 22 21:29:10 2008
grep             2.5.1            Mon Sep 22 21:05:20 2008
fortune         mod9708     Wed Oct 08 19:53:01 2008
ipc                1.4             Sun Oct 05 22:24:32 2008
binutils         2.18             Mon Sep 22 22:41:10 2008
wget             1.11             Mon Sep 22 21:14:44 2008
diffutils         2.8.1            Mon Sep 22 21:32:53 2008
checkinstall    1.6.1            Mon Sep 22 21:10:58 2008
cpio                2.9              Mon Sep 22 22:10:00 2008
gcc                 4.2.4            Wed Oct 08 23:59:38 2008

Now it is time for me to get back to gcc and see if I can get 4.3.2 to compile too. Keep tabs on my progress in the Timeline.

AbTLinux is free as in Beer

2008-10-01T13:00:00.001+02:00

We all know the statement about being "...free as in beer." Well our PR lady never rests when attempting to show you this applied to AbTLinux as well!

Here she outlines this theory with a graphic image of the elements involved in beer making. The basic ingredients are few and simple, but the results is amazing.

Here at AbTLinux we provide tooling based on Ruby, the Free Software Foundation, GNU, and the GPL license. Throw in a bit of our free time and there you have it.

It is so simple!

Finding return values from chained pipe commands in the system function

2008-09-28T11:48:00.000+02:00

I have already discussed some hints for the usage of the Ruby system method, but encountered another facet of using this system function while passing a bash command using pipes. The problem is that one gets the standard exitcode status back from bash via the $? variable. But when you use pipe to chain more than one command you only get the last command results back from the $? variable.

Enter the PIPEARRAY from bash, which allows you access to the each commands return value in the entire chain. The problem with Ruby is that this is not available after the system function ends. Again, using some smart Bash you can exit your command chain with the contents of the PIPEARRAY like this:

# a system call that exits with the value of the first command 'make'.
system("make | tee output.log; exit ${PIPESTATUS[0]}")

# examine the returned value of the command 'make'
puts $?.exitstatus

Invitation to influcene Linux World 2008 talk at Jaarbeurs Utrecht

2008-09-26T13:24:00.004+02:00

A bit of an update on the talk I will be giving in November at the Dutch Linux World 2008 in the Jaarbeurs Utrecht.

I am going to make you a unique offer. You can influence my talk by leaving a comment on this page up to the date of my presentation. I will do my best to answer any of your questions, discuss anything related to the topic of my talk, and mention any interesting comments I get live at Linux World 2008. You can't beat that for Open Source collaboration!

If you want to stop by and say hi or discuss something interesting with me at Linux World 2008 then just follow the linked banner in the top of this post or the one in the sidebar to register for free.

UPDATE: Presentation now available here.

Some uptime to work on AbTLinux

2008-09-22T21:33:00.000+02:00

It has been some time since I was last able to get to work on this project. I am busy with my new job this last year and it has paid off in a promotion! This means I have been given more work to do and this consumes much of my free time (speaking, writing, and developing software commercially can be time consuming too!).

Today I got back to this project and have started up where I left off. I am adding packages to the repository trying to get a base set sorted out. You can follow the action on our Trac site.

I am working towards v0.4, which is months overdue. Maybe time to reset all the deadlines in the milestone view?

I see that I forgot to post the last release notes, v0.3 made it out on the 22nd of May this year. For details see the Trac changeset tagging v0.3.

AbTLinux irc channel

2008-08-25T21:59:00.000+02:00

Nothing like #abtlinux on irc.freenode.net as viewed in 39" LCD!

ABout Time Linux blog online

2008-08-25T21:11:00.000+02:00

This is now the official online site for the AbT Linux project. All postings have been migrated here, a counter has been added at the bottom of the page to mark the initial starting point (I had the first hit!).

The color scheme has been carefully copied from the older site and content images moved here to preserve all the nice work from our PR Lady!

Comments welcome here to suggest improvements and should you feel the urge to become a poster / writer here, you can reach me at 'erics at abtlinux dot org' to apply for an account.

Migration of AbTLinux site over to Blogger

2008-08-18T20:44:00.001+02:00

Taking a look at moving the AbTLinux site over to Blogger to relieve some of the overhead of managing a complete site for this project.

Open Source talk at the Linux World Expo in Jaarbeurs Utrecht 2008

2008-08-12T22:08:00.007+02:00

[A cross post from my site.]

I wanted to preview the talk I am going to be giving in the Jaarbeurs Utrecht for the Linux World Expo, 12-13 November 2008. The Expo is about Open Source and I have been invited to talk about Open Source in a business context as applied at the SNS Bank. Here is the abstract of the talk (abstract is in Dutch I am afraid).

2004 tot heden. Open Source in de praktijk bij SNS Bank

SNS Bank maakte in 2004 de overstap van een vooral closed source architectuur naar een architectuur met open source componenten. Open source architectuur biedt veel voordelen voor de website van SNS Bank, waarop in 2010 alle eenvoudige producten van SNS Bank in vijf clicks beschikbaar zijn en alle dagelijkse bankzaken volledig afgehandeld kunnen worden. Eric D. Schabell, Systeem Specialist bij SNS Bank, vertelt waarom SNS Bank heeft gekozen voor open source architectuur en hoe het werkt in de praktijk.

Development behind a proxy

2008-05-20T17:24:00.001+02:00

Some of the problems you will encounter when trying to use the development tools from behind a http proxy. I have been sorting these out this week to be able to spend some evening hours on AbTLinux development and wanted to post the results here.

Subversion:
The problem here is that we need to checkout code and commit our changes to the repository. Normal anonymous checkouts are taken as so:


$ svn co http://svn2.assembla.com/svn/abtlinux

# To do this over a proxy you need to either set the
# global subversion server configuration to include a
# proxy machine address and a port specification, or
# you can put this in your users home directory
# configuration. Bother are shown here.

/etc/subversion/servers

~/.subversion/servers

# Put this in the servers file in the global section.

[global]
http-proxy-host = your-proxy-hostname
http-proxy-port = 8081

# A commit of code changes on this project as checked
# out above encounters the following error.

$ svn commit -m "Your commit message"

svn: Commit failed (details follow):
svn: MKACTIVITY of '/svn/abtlinux/!svn/act/e0331bc3-e9e7-': 400 Bad Request

# To commit your changes you need to be on the https
# version of the code repository, so you can migrate
# your existing checkout as follows.

$ svn switch --relocate
http://svn2.assembla.com/svn/abtlinux https://svn2.assembla.com/svn/abtlinux

Wget:
Finally, I ran into some wget problems when trying to download package sources. The only way to get wget to run is to set an environment variable to point to your http proxy.


$ export http_proxy="proxy-servername:8081"

Trac for AbTLinux has been recovered

2008-04-28T21:15:00.002+02:00

A few weeks ago the AbTLinux project lost its Trac machine. I was able to pick it up last week and a bit of digging in the internals turned up the fact that two of the three cooling fans were pretty borked. It sounded like a sick helo trying to land at high altitudes, if you can imagine that. It was specifically the case fan in the back and the tiny fan on the video card.

Until repairs can be made I have dissected the machine and was able to recover the entire Trac database. I have found new hosting, uploaded the old database, and the work put in to setup our development plan for 2008 was recovered.

Check it out at the AbTLinux Trac site.

AbTLinux Trac site down

2008-04-03T18:03:00.002+02:00

We seem to have lost our Trac site due to hardware failure (fan acting up). I am not sure if the box had a meltdown or was just taken offline as a preventive measure.

Either way, I have removed the site link and will put it up after low (thanks!) gets a chance to setup a new hosting location. He is a handy guy to have around and I am sure we will be up and running again soon.

And I just setup our development plan for 2008...

AbTLinux - development plans for 2008

2008-03-30T11:35:00.001+02:00

I have laid out some development plans over at our Trac site in the form of milestones, deadlines, and such for the versions up to 1.0. Basically I put a release on the schedule for every month, with plans to complete but a few issues in each period.

This is more to facilitate progress, something new every month, than to put pressure on myself. Again, the only developer so far is me!

I have on the schedule for the next release v0.3 two items:

provide for default configuration overriding
implement 10 new packages from our supported packages list

AbTLinux package manager tagged v0.2

2008-01-28T21:23:00.001+01:00

Over the last few days I have been playing with the code for abt, the AbtLinux package manager, on a newly installed Ubuntu box. The auto detection stuff that installs abt for you seems to be fine (some bugs fixed), basic features are there, and I included a new package for checkinstall.

I feel this is good enough to put out a tag, so today I give you version 0.2!

You can find it over in subversion at our site: http://www.abtlinux.org or just run:


$ svn co https://abtlinux.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/abtlinux/src/tags/abt-0.2

Feel free to provide input or comments on irc.freenode.net at #abtlinux.

Ruby include path

2007-12-31T12:58:00.001+01:00

This has been bothering me for some time, wanting to include paths that will be searched when I want to 'require' or 'load' some class in my project. It is not very nice to have to use a -I flag, but there are other ways.

Use of the $: global variable:

$:.push("/whatever")

Or the $LOAD_PATH variable:

$LOAD_PATH.unshift '/whatever'

Year in review 2007!

2007-12-31T09:37:00.002+01:00

As 2007 is almost over, I look back and see not only exciting family events, but a new job, an excellent year of cycling, and a very productive year in my open source projects.

I continued to teach freelance for IBM Netherlands Learning Services. This time for and external customer in Rijswijk, the European Patent Office. Another amazing event was that my site was Dugg, someone found my online Linux courseware and the server was severely challenged. I moved over to Blogger after that to evade. One think that came out of it all was that I took some time to update the courseware and provide distance learning solutions to all my courses.

AbTLinux project progressed well this year, I got the package manager to install its first package and much more. Another project, the Baby Game was re-released and used by three different families to run their own baby games (results: a girl and two boys). I decided to stop my work on eGroupware and the Publication Management System, just focusing on AbTLinux. I continued to post Linux and Macbook solutions on this blog (over 55), see Software category.

Wishing you all the very best for the New Year and a happy and healthy 2008!

AbTLinux - more coding progress on the package manager

2007-12-27T20:42:00.001+01:00

It has been awhile since I last posted on this subject, so thought it might be time to provide some news on the various updates to the code base.

My new job has settled down a bit so that I have been able to make some time for coding on AbTLinux. This has led to the completion of features and reduced our unit test failure count from 18 down to 12. Here is a summary of the updates:

refactored reinstalling a package to allow for fully automated runs
implemented show-frozen
implemented freeze
added /etc/abt configuration directories setup
refactored update package and package tree implementation
implemented retrieve package tree (part of package-repo add)
refactored some logging to make use of ruby Logger
implemented verify-integrity
fixes to the pruge-src function
implemented show-files

I have also split out the general software posting I was doing on AbTLinux into it's own category. This is due to the fact that I might be losing my current Trac and website hosting in 2008. I am not sure, but want to have someplace to document the projects coding progress until I am able to sort out a new site location.

Merry Christmas 2007!

2007-12-24T21:52:00.000+01:00

Twas the night before Christmas and all thru the house,
Not a creature was stirring, just me and my mouse.

Yes my friends, I am sitting here on Christmas eve and enjoying the quiet after the kids are to bed. Time to get a bit constructive as the presents have been wrapped, the stockings are hung by the chimney with care. I am about to commit some new updates to the abt package manager!

From the yet small AbTLinux team:

We wish you a very Merry Christmas, and a Happy New Year!

AbTLinux - coding month reduces failing unit tests to 18

2007-08-02T20:50:00.001+02:00

I finally found a few weeks where I could spend some time almost daily on AbTLinux and made a real good coding push. I finished up last time with 27 unit tests failing. After this coding push I am down to 18 unit tests to go!

This coding push involved some major refactoring, included a migration of the file names, method names in all classes, and general unit testing cleanup. This all involved turning my 'java-ish' code into a more 'ruby-ish' look, something pointed out to me by some of you. I checked each of these changes with the fine people that hang out on irc at #ruby-lang. Outside of this work, here is a list of issues that have been implemented:

able to purge sources for packages not installed.
a simple single word search of package descriptions available.
the verification of installed package files (are they installed) implemented.
able to view install, build, integrity, configure logs from an installed package.
able to generate a list of installed packages.
source packages are validated for sha1, currently not allowing failing checks to install.
implemented reinstalling of a package.
implemented removal of an installed package.
can remove build directory (unpacked source tree) or not, configurable in abtconfig.rb.
added ipc package source tarball to packages directory, used for copy to correct location instead of having to download sources. This speeds up unit testing.
diverse small bugs found along the way.

Over 76 separate code commits over a three week period. We have 46 unit tests running with 54 assertions, 18 failures, and no errors. Things are starting to shape up and I really need a package file generator soon to expand the testing. Things are starting to shape up nicely for the abt framework! ;-)

AbTLinux - caching package installs now!

2007-06-15T16:19:00.001+02:00

Having not put time and/or energy into my AbTLinux project lately I decided to push for at implementing one of the failing unit tests (only 27 to go!).

I choose caching a package, which is in the AbTLogManager and runs now after a successful package installation. You can see the coding progress on our Trac (if you get some Trac error message, just hit refresh until it goes away).

Only 26 failing unit tests to go!

Mocking up packages in AbTLinux with FlexMock

2007-06-13T20:01:00.001+02:00

I was looking for a solution to mocking up objects for my Ruby project Unit Tests and came across the FlexMock project.

I have been looking for something simple that would allow objects, in my case software packages, to be easily tested without all the overhead of actually running through downloads, configuring, building and installing a real package. The obvious solution is to mock up the package object and test that. FlexMock provides a rather extensive tool set for mocking up my package objects.

As of yet I have not exactly decided where and how to integrate this, but I will. For now I have included the library into the code base and will get back to this soon.