SF Personal

It’s been a while from the last post about Rapache. So I thought time has come to make our last progresses public.

For those who doesn’t know Rapache is a GTK utility that tries to ease the configuration of Apache on Debian alike systems.

This night was a long night :). It’s 6.48am here, so I’ll just get to the point: features !

Not so fast, baby !

• Thanks to Qense, Rapache now detects if Apache is not installed and refuses to run.

What’s new in the Main window

• Rapache now features two handy buttons, one to open a VirtualHost URL in the default browser and one to browse the DocumentRoot folder with Nautilus
• We moved the problem handling (for now just virtualhost not conforming to debian guidelines) in a separate tab, which appears only when its needed.

Edit window completely redesigned

• This guy, other than helping tremendously in other parts of the software, completely redesigned the VirtualHost creation window
• Rapache now allows to specify any number of aliases to be associated with the virtual host.

We has modulez !

• Module enabling/disabling was put in place. Things are not perfect, but works nicely.
• Many modules show a brief description just under the module name. I love this one :-).
• We also detect the dependencies (and that work is misspelled in the screenshot above and in the actual program - deep apologies) of every module.
• Modules .conf files editing is in the works. Not available at the moment, sorry !

How to get it

Beware, this is still an alpha release and it took a fair amount of refactoring, so you’re likely to find little glitches here and there. Despite of that, we are likely to package it today or tomorrow on our PPA. If you’re not prone to wait, you can check it out right now with bzr:

#install bazaar if you don't already have it
sudo apt-get install bzr
#to get rapache
bzr branch lp:~rapache-devel/rapache/rapache-stage0
#to launch it
cd rapache-stage0
./rapache

If you prefer to wait to get the old version from the repository and just wait for updates you can add these lines to your repository list and then:

#install it
sudo apt-get install rapache
#run it
rapache

Lending an hand

You can always lend us an hand.

• If you’re interested in the project, just checkout the Launchpad Page, or drop to say hi in #rapache-devel on freenode. Feel free to branch the last revision, play with it and propose it for merge.

• If you have any suggestion please open a bug in launchpad, we’d love to hear from you !
• Let you friends know about the project, this could help us get some contributors. Digg or share the link of this page and/or project page, or post it in your favourite forum.

…to my wallet.

Wandering for the net today,  I had the luck/misfortune to follow a Google advertising link about some Ubuntu certification courses. The ad recited something like “Ubuntu Certification Corse for only 3100€ !”. Holy crap, I really had to click.

See the original web page.

While I am happy about Ubuntu growth, I really think the cost is an overkill. Please keep in mind the place we’re talking about, Italy is one of the nations with lower average incomes of all Europe (difficult here to get more than 900€/month if your at your first work experience. You’re likely to get even less)

The program of the courses follows the Canonical’s for Ubuntu Certification (translated at hand from that italian page)

Ubuntu Linux Professional - Corso 1

• General overview of Ubuntu community (where to find help, etc)
• Basic installation of Ubuntu
• GNU & UNIX commands
• Hardware & architecture
• Installing and managing Linux package
• Devices and filesystems of Linux. Standards of Linux filesystem hierarchy
• X Window

Ubuntu Linux Professional - Corso 2

• Il kernel - Managing, reconfiguring, building, installling a personalized kernel
• Printing - Local and remote management
• Documentation (???)
• Shells, scripting, Programming (???) & compiling
• Amministration duties (?)
• Networking foundations
• Networking services
• Security

Achieving an Ubuntu Certification is ultra nice, but I highly doubt many people will ever think about donating 3100 to the cause. Ten days of course are unlikely to give you any real knowledge and business owners know that - so.. what is going to be the return of your investment ? Unhappy to be said, this configures itself as yet another bland attempt to get money out of unemployed people desperation.

As the cost includes exams price, a overall cost of 1000 euros for both courses would have been more than appropriate. If you have 3000 euros to spend for a 10 days course, my honest advice is to go to some LUG or Loco looking for a private teacher to hire.

I have nothing against Canonical’s partners, but there are many better suited charities causes to donate money for. I wonder if it’s the same in other countries (keeping in mind different costs of life and average incomes, obviously). Did anyone have related experiences ?

Disclaimer: what follows below is just chit-chat oriented, no serious assumptions down there

Playing with Google Trends I settled for doing yet-another Linux distro competition. Here’s the results:

So the question is: does Ubuntu success help Linux ? Sure as smurfs ! (you believe in smurfs, right ?) From the graphs, anyway, seems like people interest in other distribution actually decreased. Gosh, one would expect them to be slowly growing, just because of last times general Linux success and hype.

Even worse, net’s interest in Debian itself seems uninfluenced or deteriorated.

This is not to say Ubuntu is detrimental to Debian. Ubuntu contributes patches back to debian, for example. (while the quantity of the contributions has been disputed sometimes).

While the above is obviously disputable, one thing I know for sure. Ubuntu hurted Britney Spears popularity. See yourself:

Sorry Britney, we love you.

The moment has come ! Firefox 3 is out. If you have some  computer still running firefox 2 it’s time to upgrade !

It’s been 2 busy days. I didn’t really expected to receive any response on my previous post about Rapache and that was cool. Some of the received suggestion have been  already implemented, so, if you’re still interested in Rapache, pull it from stage0 branch and check it out.

Shhht! Don’t tell anyone, the secret command to get the code is:

bzr branch lp:~rapache-devel/rapache/rapache-stage0

Some people asked how to help.

Well, the first way to help is to open new bugs (even for feature requests, just open a bug and explain your idea). You can do it at https://launchpad.net/rapache .

The second way is actually… to solve bugs, or indicate a way to solve them. I’ve tagged a bunch of them as ‘need-help’. You cand find them here: https://bugs.launchpad.net/rapache/+bugs?field.tag=need-help. For this kind of bugs, we don’t need a full patch, you can just send a proof of concept indicating how to solve the bug. That would save us a nice amount of googling :-).

I forgot to say: thank you thank you thank you.

Thank you thank you thanks to you all for having told me that rapache gui sucked. Shame on you :-). I tried to re-organize the main window at the best of my skills. We also had to wake up Luana and ask her to revamp our application icon.

Here is the result of all the effort:

As you can see Rapache can now take care of vhost definitions only present into /etc/apache2/sites-enabled and not present inside sites-available (the correct way would be to create the vhost configuration file inside sites-available and then link to it from sites-enabled in order to enabling it).

How do Rapache and Ubuntu relate ?

My very first aim with Rapache was to help webdev beginners and webdesigner (oh, they hate configuration files so much) to quickly be able to handle apache in the correct way. Giving support in ubuntu irc support channels I noticed many people came there asking how to set up apache and, even easy as it is creating a new virtual host, helping them required a lot of time each.

As for now, the primary goal of apache is to get in a decent shape soon enough to be proposed for Intrepid universe repositories. In order to be able to accomplish such goal, we should focus on a realistic set of features and test them enough to make everything working smoothly. It’s of course better a small working program than a big buggy ball of mud.

That said: which features do you think we still miss in order to make sense for a repo inclusion ? Would you open some bug in launchpad and tell us about what we need to do ? Help us hit the duck :-).

Come say “hello!”

Last post I forgot to tell we have an irc channel on freenode. Feel free to drop in #rapache-devel to greet us and talk to us.

For those who missed the announce on Ubuntu Planet, a new project - called Rapache - is born.

What is Rapache ?

Rapache is a simple Apache administration tool. It offers a GTK interface to allow extremely rapid VirtualHost creation and manipulation.

Favicons add a nice touch to the list

Personally, as a web developer, I felt the need of a simple tool to manage virtualhosts on my localhost for a long time, just because creating them at hand is way too time consuming than I’d like. Then, right after stumbling on this and reading users comments (some may be biased, I know), I decided to make such a tool by myself.

Funnily enough, me and Emgent had the same idea at the same time so, when he announced the project, I got in touch with him and we decided to join forces.

What to expect

Personally I would have not announced the project before having already put together the basic program. We divided our roadmap in basically 3 stages, the first being my original previous goal.

• Stage 0: basic functionality on localhost. Virtual hosts and Apache modules enabling/disabling/modification. Aimed to web developers.
• Stage 1: Localization, more polished Gui. Functional separation before GUI and Libraries (i.e. a number of handy commands you can use from commandline). A number of handy wizards to handle common configuration issue. More Apache configuration options available from the GUI
• Stage 2: Sky’s the limit ;-). Handling remote servers via SSH. Server bookmarking.

What not to expect

At the moment we’re relying on debian way to handle Apache configuration. So do not expect to be able to run Rapache on a non-debian system at lease before Stage 3, maybe not even afterwards. That’s mainly because the debian way of manage Apache confs is much more easy to handle than the upstream’s one.

In a way we’re creating Rapache for Ubuntu itself (and Debian, by reflex) rather than for Linux in general. Despite of that we’re open for people willing to help us hacking it to work on non-debian systems either.

Where to find us

• Launchpad project page: https://launchpad.net/rapache
• Messy wiki page: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Rapache

While Firefox 3 inclusion in hardy was quite disputed I can say I am quite happy about it.
This evening I was downloading a big file. After some waiting firefox found an update for my extensions and asked to be restarted.

Having just forgot about my download, I said yes and, wow ! After restarting the download resumed just from the point I left it !

Fire up your gnome terminal, and press ctrl+r. Now you can find-as-you-type any command you gave in the past (limited to your bash history size). Neat !

To open a file with root permissions using gedit you normally would have to drop to terminal and type gksudo gedit filename.

Waiting for devs to implement policykit into gedit too, you can install an handy nautilus plugin which makes appear a context menu entry to “open as administrator” on every file.

Installing is as simple as typing:

sudo apt-get install nautilus-gksu

Hardy’s package, sadly, has a bug that prevents the entry for appearing. If you don’t see the entry appearing even after restarting X here’s the fix:

sudo cp /usr/lib/nautilus/extensions-1.0/libnautilus-gksu.so /usr/lib/nautilus/extensions-2.0/
killall nautilus

The entry should now appear. Worth of noting that this workaround could be disabled from future updates (although probably next update will just fix the bug)

If you like me like to have icons on desktop but sometimes need to just hide everything to better concentrate on what you’re doing you may like this little bash script I came out with. (warning: this post applies only to gnome)

Istructions

Verify you have gconf2 installed. Do that with: sudo apt-get install gconf2.

You need a folder where to store this script (along with other scripts maybe), so make one or just use your home folder. So, open this folder and create an empty file. Call it toggle_desktop.sh or something like that. Open it with gedit and paste this text in the file.

#!/bin/bash

if [ $(gconftool-2  --get /apps/nautilus/preferences/show_desktop) == "true"  ]; then
	echo “disabling desktop”
	gconftool-2   –type boolean –set /apps/nautilus/preferences/show_desktop “false”
else
	echo “enabling desktop”
	gconftool-2   –type boolean –set /apps/nautilus/preferences/show_desktop “true”
fi;

# nautilus may crash ( !#£%$$@à###!!!! )

echo “checking if nautilus is still up”
sleep 1
if [ $( ps xa | grep nautilus | grep -v grep ) -z ]; then
	echo “nautilus is not up or crashed. Restarting nautilus”
	nautilus -n &
	echo “everything done.”
else
	echo “all good - finishing job”
fi;

Done ? Save it and close gedit. Right click it, choose properties, then permissions and mark the file as executable.

Now all you need to do is double click it to hide or show your desktop icons. You may want to drag the file to your panel to access it more easily:

Note: There are a few shortcomings.

1. The first is that when you hide your icons, you cannot anymore right click on the desktop. Nor changing desktop background works, it will get applied when you show your icons again.
2. The second thing is that while hiding your desktop is quite fast showing it again may take 1 second or two and your window manager may become unresponsive in the meantime.
3. Third thing to keep in mind: sometimes nautilus just crashes. I’ve included a quick check in the script to restart it. Nautilus crashing means it could just wipe (close) away all you’re opened file browsers. In my tests I’ve never one file browser wiped away, but it could happen. Nothing dangerous, only annoying.