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Institutions vs Collaboration or why open source projects will be successful

by on August 22, 2008 in Uncategorized

I just watched this TED talk by Clay Shirky that was recorded in July 2005 but only recently posted to the TED website. Given that the talk is 3 years old, he gives a meaningful insights of our society and how Institutional thinking is working. Especially the example of Steve Ballmer not understanding Linux still holds up today (even thought Microsoft tries so hard to enter the open source game).

I suggest you spend 20 minutes watching this and reflect what has happened in the last 3 years.

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Linus Torvalds interview on open source, GPL and other issues

by on July 20, 2008 in Uncategorized

This interview with Linus Torvalds is probably one of the best interviews in a long time on open source, GPL and Linux. He gives a very personal view on all topics and says it “as it is”. Especially the answers he gives on the different licenses are good and are interesting to people who think that one CFML engine is superior to another because of a license.

Here is one of my favorite quotes and also the last answer of the interview;

“Of course open source grows aggressively: what’s not to like? Low cost, great quality, and a lack of being shackled to some commercial company that you can’t really trust further than the fact that they’ll happily continue to take your money. Sure, it grows.

And yes, it does grow at the cost of Microsoft, but that’s called ’competition’. It doesn’t make it ‘cancer’ any more than it ever made it ‘un-American’.”

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java-1.4.2-gcj-compat.i386 update problem on CentOS

by on July 11, 2008 in Uncategorized

When you try to install the current available updates;

java-1.4.2-gcj-compat.i386               1.4.2.0-40jpp.115      base
java-1.4.2-gcj-compat-devel.i386         1.4.2.0-40jpp.115      base
java-1.4.2-gcj-compat-javadoc.i386       1.4.2.0-40jpp.115      base
java-1.4.2-gcj-compat-src.i386           1.4.2.0-40jpp.115      base

you will get the following error message;

Error: Missing Dependency: /usr/bin/rebuild-security-providers is needed by package java-1.4.2-gcj-compat

Apparently the solution to this is to install the latest version of the jpackage-utils. The new version can be found at the CentOS testing repros at http://dev.centos.org/centos/5/testing/i386/RPMS/jpackage-utils-1.7.5-1jpp.1.el5.centos.noarch.rpm.

Once you downloaded the RPM, install it with rpm -Uvh. You then will be able to update your system successfully with “yum update”.

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Update on installing JRE 6 on CentOS

by on June 26, 2008 in Uncategorized

Looking at my blog statistics shows that my post on “Installing the latest JRE 6 on CentOS” is one of the top positions. Also a lot of search engines referrals come to this post.

Thus I would like to give a short update to the blog post, since some things have changed since then. Also CentOS has been updated to Version 5.2 in the meantime.

The way I have done it with modifying the symbolic link in “/usr/bin/java/” still works, but it is not the recommended way to do it. Thus I follow here the path that the CentOS project has outlined. Where applicable I updated the link information. So, without further ado, let’s install JRE 6 or update it to the latest Version (update 6 for 6) as of today (06/26/2008).

  1. Install the “jpackage-utils” (should already be installed) with;
    “yum install -y jpackage-utils”
  2. Download the JRE 1.6 from Sun. Grab the one that with “…RPM in self-extracting file”.
  3. Make the downloaded “bin” file executable and run the installation. Enter;
    “chmod +x jdk-6u1-linux-i586-rpm.bin”
    and follow with;
    “./jdk-6u1-linux-i586-rpm.bin”
    This will give you the RPM file to install.
  4. Next, download the needed add on package from:
    http://mirrors.dotsrc.org/jpackage/1.7/generic/non-free/RPMS/ The file you should download starts with “java-1.6-sun……..”. Got it? Let’s continue.
  5. Now install both RPM’s with;
    “rpm -Uvh jdk-6u6-linux-i586.rpm”
    and
    “rpm -Uvh java-1.6.0-sun-compat-1.6.0.06-1jpp.i586.rpm”
    (Since you might already have a older version of Java 6 installed the first will tell you that it is installed and will abort the installation. Thus separating the two installations.)
  6. IF you have already modified the symbolic link under “/usr/bin/java/” then you should remove this link now! Simply issue a;
    “rm -f /usr/bin/java”
  7. Now with the “alternative” system you can switch between the JVM easy. Since we want to have 1.6 running you need to set this in the alternatives. Luckily this is simply done with;
    “/usr/sbin/alternatives –config java”
    You should now see the following;

    Enter “2″ into the selection prompt. The system has now changed the Java runtime for you to the new 6 release.
  8. Test it with;
    “java -version” and you should get this;

That’s it. You are all set with the latest Java update. With future updated of Java all you need to do is to download the JRE from Sun and install it.

Remember if you set the JAVA_HOME variable in your profile to update it as well to the new installation!

Comments { 218 }
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