Geeks In Action

My new Acer Aspire came in to work. It’s a compact machine that has what I consider to be very good specs for its size and price. Most importantly it’s pretty Linux friendly. The first thing I did was blow out Windows 7 with a Fedora 12 install. Here are a couple pics of it on my desk.

This system replaces a rather old and rather large HP machine that sat below my desk. My feet are happy with the new room that they get. I picked this machine up via Tiger Direct. Their customer service was solid in helping me get the order done and it arrived very quickly.

This was my first 64 bit Fedora install. Everything was pretty normal. The only issue I’ve run into is Adobe does not have a version of Air available for 64 bit Linux. They have instructions to install the 32 bit version but they are very out of date and I’m not comfortable with what they want done anyway. So I will be foregoing Air for the time being. Maybe this will motivate to get back to work on the twitter client I was trying to get done. I think we all agree the world needs more Twitter clients.

This is funny to me in light of my last post. I have installed UnixODBC, I installed the gui tool to manage it and then I installed MDBTools to allow me to connect to a JET database. (This is all on my Fedora 12 machine by the way for those just joining us.) The funny part is that the time I spent getting the gui tool was wasted as it wont work with the driver anyway, at least not the way I’ve set it up. Not sure why, not sure that I care. Here is what I did to get it to work. First I checked for the driver ( /usr/lib/libmdbodbc.so.0 in my case ). It was there so I edited /etc/odbcinst.ini and added the following entry.

[MDBToolsODBC]
Description = MDB Tools ODBC
Driver = /usr/lib/libmdbodbc.so.0
Setup =
FileUsage =
CPTimeout =
CPReuse =

That takes care of telling UnixODBC about the driver. I wonder if there is a file from MDBTools that I can use for the setup part. Not sure, may look into it at some point. The next step was creating a DSN. That involved adding the following lines to /etc/odbc.ini (Which existed but was empty because I hadn’t created any entries yet.)

[lintry]
Description = Microsoft Access Try DB
Driver = MDBToolsODBC
Database = /home/jr.peck/Documents/lintry.mdb
Servername = localhost
Username =
Password =
port = 5432

Here is what a connection in Python could look like.

import pyodbc

sql = 'Select * from foo'

conn = pyodbc.connect('DSN=lintry')
cursor = conn.cursor()
cursor.execute(sql)
rows = cursor.fetchall()

for record in rows:
    print record.FirstName + ' ' + record.LastName

cursor.close()
conn.close()

In my database the table foo contains three columns and the first two are FirstName and LastName. So anyone messing this will obviously need to change it to match their table name, column names, etc. This last piece of getting things to work on Linux wasn’t really necessary but it didn’t take all that long to figure out and I’m glad I did, in case I do need it down the road. I imagine this would work just the same for any other programming language that could take advantage of UnixODBC.

I’ve been running Fedora 11 for a while but the upgrade to 12 was highly recommended here, so I kicked off the upgrade per these instructions. To put it simply, the instructions require typing a single word in at the command line. Even I could get my head around that.

First I backed everything up. I’ve got an external drive that’s large enough to hold everything that matters. If something were to go wrong with this I wouldn’t be rolling back to the previous state. I’ll just wipe the machine and do a fresh install. But I’d like to see how this process goes.

I am a bit bummed that it’s not done this morning. I kicked it off last night and went home. Shortly after I left it stopped, to prompt me about something and so it really didn’t make any progress last night. That’s a bit disappointing and there is probably a way to do a silent install – but it’s not the end of the world. It’s not like the whole thing blew up on me – it just waited for me to come back. I’m in HR type meetings all day, so I’m hoping things are done by the end of that.

My Fedora machine has finished upgrading to 11. I didn’t time it exactly but it looks like it took roughly 4 hours. That’s primarily due to the fact that it’s an older and slower machine. No errors or issues at this point – the login page doesn’t have the blue sun with solar flares any more. The new one looks cool but I really liked that sun. Have to see if there is a way to get it back.

First thing I did was start up my synergy server – because using a full size keyboard is where it is at.

I’m pleased that things looked to have gone well. For a bleeding edge distro Fedora is pretty smooth. There are bumps of course, that’s part of being out front – finding and marking them but all in all I’m impressed with just how usable it is as a desktop OS.

My Fedora system just told me it wants to upgrade to 11. I haven’t done a Fedora upgrade in years. They used to always blow up on me so I got into the habit of backing up what I needed and doing a fresh install. They roll out new versions pretty rapidly so I also got into the habit of skipping every other version. I did break that pattern though when KDE 4 came out because I wanted to move forward as rapidly as possible as they fixed the pretty sever issues it had.

So we’ll see if things are any different now. The package manager software just popped up and so I told it to go ahead. Now it says it has 5 steps to preparing:

• Download release info
• Download installer images
• Determine which packages to download
• Download packages
• Prepare and test upgrade

It says I can just keep working away while it does it’s thing but I think I’ll try to stay off that box to some extent so it can get done as quickly as possible.

I started working on a project today that uses the MySQL relational database to save data on the back-end. One of the packages available for Fedora 10, my current desktop OS, is the mysql-gui-tools package. This includes the MySQL Administrator and MySQL Query Browser programs. I had those already installed, but after a few minutes I knew that the Query Browser just wasn’t going to work for me. I kept trying to copy queries into the little window, and errors were getting into it somewhow. And even if that weren’t happening, I couldn’t get it to resize and not being able to look at more than a couple lines at a time was driving me nuts. So I hopped over to OTN and grabbed Oracle SQL Developer. SQL Developer was built with Oracle in mind but it can connect to a variety of database systems.

continue reading…

Here are some screen shots of my Fedora 10 Desktop with Virtualbox open running Windows 7 beta. This is not exactly how Windows 7 would look running natively due to VirtualBox not supporting DirectX – so no Aero. Also I went in to the options and turned on the option to see what would normally be hidden files, all file extensions, etc. So some of this is not the default look. For a lot of good screen shots of the install process… check out this blog post. Pics below, click on them for larger.