Author: chriseyre2000

want and nant

~ chriseyre2000 ~ Leave a comment
I have been using the want build tool to manage a resonable size delphi project.
However I have taken over support of some related C# code.
I am investigating porting the delphi specific tasks (delphi compiler, the resource compiler and dunit) to nant. So far the hardest part has been getting each of them to build in the IDE.
Once this is done I will be able to create a unified build tool.

Adventures in XP

~ chriseyre2000 ~ Leave a comment
I have just bought a laptop. It contains my first version of windows XP.
I dislike the entire concept of product activation and have avoided XP so far.
The laptop however had no choice of OS (OK I could have either XP Home or XP Pro).

XP so far has been less user friendly than Mandriva or Ubuntu.
It tries to be helpful but limits you to dumb choices.
I am having fun getting it to detect my WiFi network.
It seems to assume that all other machines on the network are XP as well.
So score it down as does not play well with others.

I have been forced to manually power the machine down to kill an app – something I have not needed to do in Linux.

Palm drawbacks

~ chriseyre2000 ~ Leave a comment
The only problem that I ahve had with the T5 software is that it does not play well with minimum security. For obvious reasons I do not spend my time on my windows box logged in as admin. However the Palm desktop apps don’t seem to behave properly. It looks like I will need to make myself admin, install the apps and the demote myself again.

Ubdate: This worked!

Bluetooth and Palm.

~ chriseyre2000 ~ Leave a comment
I am somewhat of a fan of the Palm handheld devices.
They have the advantage over other systems of just working with one button resyncs.
I like the way that if a unit dies (I am now on my fourth Palm in 6 years – one of which was broken by being dropped onto a hard surface) you can just resync a new one and it installs all of your core data and most of the applications. I have lost a few minor apps due to the large jump I made recently (moving from a Palm IIIc to a T5).

Currently I am trying to get my T5 to join my LAN using bluetooth. The default settings insist on internet connection sharing which assumes that the modem is on the connecting machine and that does not play well with my router setup.

Here is link to an app that will allow the bluetooth virtual comport (COM3) to be used to connect to the LAN. I am aiming to have a small website on my home pc that can act as a gateway for the apps that I need to access remotely.

Mono on Ubuntu

~ chriseyre2000 ~ Leave a comment
This is an article I found about installing Mono on Ubuntu.

I have the command line compiler and am just trying to get MonoDevelop working.
It requires certain items that are not there by default on Ubuntu (not Ubuntu’s fault – it is still a young distribution and only includes stable tested parts).

Adventures in Linux part 2

~ chriseyre2000 ~ Leave a comment
I have given up on Mandriva.
It is a great end-user distribution but I wanted to extend it further and ran into problems.

My next try was Suse.
The Suse live cd failed to boot on the old hardware I am using.
Failure at the first hurdle.

Next up was Ubuntu linux.
I have a Warty Warthog CD.
The installer is text based and less polished than the Mandriva version.
However once you have told it what to partition it performs its own install.
It provides the basic items that you need out of the box and installs from one cd.

It is very easy to update using either the gui synaptic package manager or via the commandline apt utility.

Initial it seemed rather slow until I found that it comes with a kernel built for the 386.
It is easy to use synaptic to update to a newer kernel.

I then found out that Hoary Hedgehog the successor to Warty Warthog had been released.

The instructions for this are not very clear to the uninitiated so here is a simple version:

  • Open a console as root.
  • cd /etc/apt
  • chmod +wr sources.list
  • emacs sources.list
  • replace all references to warty with hoary
  • If you want non-official packages uncomment the universe lines (remove the # characters)
  • save and close emacs
  • sudo apt-get update
  • sudo apt-get dist-upgrade

Wait and then you have a Hoary Hedgehog system.
I am trying to get a system with mono installed.

Ubuntu is a very young debian based distribution. With a little polish it looks like it will be a very good system.

Ubuntu is by default a Gnome system compared to the KDE default of Mandriva and Knoppix.