Thursday, December 29, 2011

esxi 5.0 - love it or hate it

I love it. Come on, you have to.
It's free (for two cpu's up to 6 cores each and 96 GB of RAM)!
It's easier than Esxi 4.0 (service management included)!
AND it is missing rsync - just like the previous versions. Well, that is the only downside.

Esxi 5.0 changed a bit the way of customizing the barebone hypervisor. No more oem.tgz (which was a pain anyway), welcome .vib's (which hurts even more).

SSH enabling for an example, is now easily done through the ESXi vSphere client (from the Security profile panel). The key management changed a bit tho.
The /.ssh directory is no more; instead, ssh can easily be configured from the

/etc/ssh

location. More specifically, certificates stored in the

/etc/ssh/keys-root/authorized_keys

file allows for "freedom of connectivity" for certified hosts. Easy!

If on one side vSphere client has alot of new features for easing your virtual manager life (service enabling / disabling), some things still are missing - like the rsync for example.

Monday, December 26, 2011

svn client for n9

svn is available from the Apache subversion repository.

svn depends on the libapr, libaprutils, libexpat and libdb packages; the first two can be found from the Fremantle 1.3 repo extras-devel. Grab them through wget and install them with dpkg -i (in that order).

The libdb has to be taken from the latest harmattan beta repo (provided you have installed the repository package as mentioned in here); sqlite is also needed but a simple

apt-get install sqlite3-dev

is good enough.

Libexpat can be installed as dev package from apt:

apt-get install libexpat1-dev

Afterwards, you can configure svn (with reference to apr / apr-util corrected):

configure --with-apr=/usr/local/apr --with-apr-util=/usr/local/apr

and make should work just like a charm :).
After that, make install and your svn will be installed (by default) under /usr/local/bin

Saturday, December 10, 2011

Harmattan repository dependencies package

A first problem that the (few) N9 developers face is presented by the fact that there seems to be no apparent possibility for on-device compilation.
Nokia provides a proper Scratchbox and QT as development environments.
But what can be done for the people who would like to work from Windows and still compile natively?

Well, as always, the truth lies just beneath the surface, and specifically, it lies in a special .deb package deployed on the Nokia Harmattan Beta Repository

At that location, all the different beta's are made available.
We are looking for a very specific package, namely the package harmattan-repository_0.4+0m6_all.deb, which, when installed, will update our aptitude sources with the proper beta repository.

NOTE: at this time, it has not been tested if packages from previous beta versions refer to the latest beta. Thus, I strongly suggest you to grab the mentioned package from the latest beta, always.

So, in order to access the beta repository (and finally perform on-device compilation), follow the simple steps:

1) fire up a shell on your N9, wget the following package: http://harmattan-dev.nokia.com/pool/harmattan-beta3/free/h/harmattan-repository/harmattan-repository_0.4+0m6_all.deb
2) switch to root (devel-su)
3) dpkg -i

Once this has completed, install libc6-dev, gcc, g++ with apt-get and you will be ready to develope on your device! :)

Sunday, October 23, 2011

MeeGo - Go N9!

Just got my hands on this nifty little device. I LOVE it.
Apparently the phone is selling well. Although Nokia has released no numbers on the total of Phones produced, or any numbers on how many actually have been sold yet. It is what it was meant for : a phone for geeks.

So what do you need in order to develop on a N9? On Windows, QTCreator is the best choice. Make sure you install the HARMATTAN (funny how Nokia wants users know that it is highly "experimental") extensions. That's it. This will give you a perfect RAD environment to develop apps out of the pocket in a fast and straightforward way.

On Linux, you can do the same and install QtCreator. Or, in case you feel confident enough in jiggling the penguin, you can do it the proper way and go for the Scratchbox (for those versions that actually support it):

http://harmattan-dev.nokia.com/unstable/beta2/harmattan-sdk-setup.py

This will give you a total freedom; price is infinite complexity.
Typicall steps, in this case, include:

a) Locating sources of components that your application might depend upon and will be missing from the standard Harmattan repo (located in http://harmattan-dev.nokia.com/pool btw)
b) Building the components
c) Build your code against them
d) Create a package : dpkg-buildpackage -D