Skip to main content

Using Linux

I’ve used linux/unix quite a bit over the years. Probably my first experience with Linux was when I bought a magazine in the 90’s that had Mandrake linux on CD. Since then I’ve used distributions from Slackware to Ubuntu, but never really had a desire to do much with the OS once I had it running, so it just usually sat on my harddrive.

I have recently been reminded why I was never interested in using *nix exclusively. Don’t get me wrong here, I think the concept of free open-source software operating systems is great. (Edit 09/2010: I’ve been using Ubuntu Linux 10.04 and have had generally a good experience with it for a few months as my primary desktop. I’m going to keep using it…)

Let me go over a scenario to explain my thoughts:
Goal: Setup Debian Linux so that I can test my software. I specifically want to use a VMWARE appliance so that I don’t have to mess around with my current OS. (Edit: I’ve since switched over to Sun’s VirtualBox software, which is much better than the free version of VMWARE).
Time spent: Too long in my opinion…

Some general notes for myself on how to get the OS setup as I need it:

  • Use the synaptic package manager to install PostgreSQL, POSTGIS, and MONO. Attempt to use PostgreSQL with no success because permissions are difficult to understand by default.
  • Somehow figured out that I need to su into “root”, before I can su into the “postgres” account, before I can run “PSQL” before I can create a user, before I can create a database and/or configure something to get a table with POSTGIS extensions loaded. The documentation online doesn’t seem to explain this process from step 1. (The point of this complexity is what? Security?)
  • Or add a root password to the postgres account by “su postgres” from root, “psql -d template1” to startup the psql program, and running “ALTER USER postgres WITH PASSWORD ‘VALUE’; ”
  • When in doubt put sh in front of a command. I wanted to restart the Postgre server after installing add-ons it seems that I need. Every online tutorial I found didn’t work. I navigate to /etc/init.d/ and then executed “sh postgresql-8.3 restart” which worked. For whatever reason I needed to have sh in the command.
  • The command “createlang plpgsql template1” needs to be executed under postgres before a POSTGIS template can be created. Remember to restart the server afterward, and also you must create the table after doing that command, not before.
  • When creating a table in the GUI Postgre admin program you need to specify that it uses “template1” otherwise when executing “psql -d postgis_template -f /usr/share/postgresql-8.3-postgis/lwpostgis.sql” you will received errors saying that a language can’t be found. One plus of Debian is that the Postgre admin application can be installed easily in their add/remove programs tool.

If my goals were different here, I would actually prefer Linux. Say I wanted to setup a server without a GUI or something that’s accessible from the outside world and required a good deal of security. All of this would be just fine.

Surely there must be a smarter way to design things for the needs of workstation tasks as well as tasks that require high security…

Labels:

Popular posts from this blog

ChatGPT is a new, and faster, way to do programming!

Currently ChatGPT is in a free “initial research preview” . One of its well known use cases at this point is generating software code. I’ve also just used it to write most of this article… Well, actually a future article about cleaning up SRT subtitle files of their metadata faster than I have been by hand with Notepad++ and its replace functionality. Update: I recorded a screencast of writing the SRT subtitle cleaner application loading and processing portion. I relied heavily on ChatGPT for code. It was a fun process! https://youtu.be/TkEW39OloUA ChatGPT, developed by OpenAI, is a powerful language model that can assist developers in a variety of tasks, including natural language processing and text generation. One such task that ChatGPT can help with is creating an SRT cleaner program. SRT, or SubRip Subtitle, files are commonly used to add subtitles to video files. However, these files can become cluttered with unnecessary information, such as timing lines or blank spaces. To clean...
Read more

Theme error in 2010s Android App after AppCompat Migration

I plan on releasing a lot of my old work as GPL open source, but most of it has aged to the point that it no longer functions, or if it does work it’s running in compatibility mode. Basically it’s no longer best practices. Not a good way to start off any new public GPL projects, in my opinion. The current project I’m working on is an Android app that calculates star trails meant to help photographers get or avoid that in their night time photos. For now I’m going to skip some of the import process because I didn’t document it exactly. It’s been mostly trial and error as I poke around Android Studio post import. The Android Studio import process… Removing Admob Google Play code before the project would run at all. After removing dependencies, it kind of worked, but when running it in the emulator it shows a pop-up message saying that the app was developed for an old version of Android. Going through the process of updating code to match current best practices… I had the IDE convert the ...
Read more

Printing to file in Linux WINE

I noticed that this post has been sitting as a draft since 2011. At this point I have no idea if it’s useful or what I was even doing, but I might as well make it public in case someone can find it helpful! So I’ve been trying to get one of those PDF print drivers working in WINE without success. I then came upon a process that might work. When printing you need to select the checkbox “Print to file” that creates a .prn file. Just Linux things... I was using a program that only has printing facilities, but I want to export around 100 pages of text and images. Once you have the .prn (postscript) file, you can do any number of things to it. In my case I want the postscript file to be converted to HTML. I am also considering PDF format because that has more conversion options to eventually get me to HTML or plain text. sudo apt-get install cups-pdf Or it looks like that package might have changed to this… sudo apt-get install printer-driver-cups-pdf Where PDFs would be generated in /home/...
Read more