eclipse luna 4.4 - things I've done for Ubuntu 12.04 64bit

As I've reinstalled on 64bit, starting over with Eclipse, this time 4.4 Luna, here's a handler article with things I did so far, so I won't forget them:

1. .desktop file

gedit /usr/share/applications/eclipse-luna.desktop with the following content:

[Desktop Entry]

Encoding=UTF-8

Name=Eclipse

Type=Application

Comment=Eclipse Luna 4.4 64bit IDE

Exec=env UBUNTU_MENUPROXY=0 SWT_GTK3=0 //eclipse -vm //java 

Icon=//icon.xpm

Categories=Application;Development;Java;IDE

Name[en]=Eclipse

Terminal=false

NoDisplay=false

2. eclipse.ini - supplementary than default provided

-Xms128m

-Xmx2048m

-Xss2m

-Xverify:none

-Duser.name=Radu Cadariu

3. ugly and non-readable tooltips

source: http://www.devsniper.com/black-tooltip-in-eclipse-on-ubuntu-12-04/

which is saying this:

sudo apt-get install gnome-color-chooser

Specific tab, you can setup background/foreground colors for tooltips. I am (also) using for foreground black(#000000), background blue(#C2DFFD)

4. ugly big tabs for Luna UI. 

source: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1465712

gedit ~/.gtkrc-2.0

style "gtkcompact" {

GtkButton::default_border={0,0,0,0}

GtkButton::default_outside_border={0,0,0,0}

GtkButtonBox::child_min_width=0

GtkButtonBox::child_min_heigth=0

GtkButtonBox::child_internal_pad_x=0

GtkButtonBox::child_internal_pad_y=0

GtkMenu::vertical-padding=1

GtkMenuBar::internal_padding=0

GtkMenuItem::horizontal_padding=4

GtkToolbar::internal-padding=0

GtkToolbar::space-size=0

GtkOptionMenu::indicator_size=0

GtkOptionMenu::indicator_spacing=0

GtkPaned::handle_size=4

GtkRange::trough_border=0

GtkRange::stepper_spacing=0

GtkScale::value_spacing=0

GtkScrolledWindow::scrollbar_spacing=0

GtkTreeView::vertical-separator=0

GtkTreeView::horizontal-separator=0

GtkTreeView::fixed-height-mode=TRUE

GtkWidget::focus_padding=0

}

class "GtkWidget" style "gtkcompact"

The 3 and 4 affects the GTK on the system, so I'll take them with a grain of salt related to changes in the overall Ubuntu UI.

Now that I have my handler, if I find more things to change, I'll get back to this entry.

quick note for my dual displays - xrandr command worth booking

so I have a laptop and another monitor, whose position was to the left, and then I positioned it to my laptop's right.

The problem was the mouse translation from laptop to the monitor, annoyance !

So I changed settings, and I got an error when trying to apply the new position.

Solution is given here:

http://askubuntu.com/questions/174195/gdbus-error-when-trying-to-enable-second-screen

Which led me to issue locally:

> xrandr --current

and then the proper command for my case:

> xrandr --output LVDS1 --auto --left-of HDMI1

and bingo, things are back to normal.

More info for fun: http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/Xorg_RandR_1.2

4 years on Ubuntu ... thoughts crossing my mind

I was checking stats on my blog when I spotted that on 6/8/10 I wrote my first impressions after I've switched to Ubuntu

4 years later, here are some thoughts:

~ I've performed one upgrade, from 10.04 to 12.04 LTS (I don't remember the details ... ha)

~ as much as all my apps (including some internal ones) are working fine on Ubuntu 12.04 LTS, the same is not true for Ubuntu 14.04 LTS. At this moment, I'm NOT ready to move upwards.

~ I've NEVER looked back not only to Win XP, but not even to Win 7. In fact, one friend of mine asked me to help with a Win 8 notebook, I was looking strange for 3 minutes, then I gave up. Win 7 is still manageable, Win 8 is alien. To Excel credit, there is still a need for it, which is where virtualization comes to rescue. For everything else, there's OpenOffice.

~ I'm also looking strange to Ubuntu future: Desktop / Tablets / Mobile. meh ...

~ Both Microsoft and Ubuntu should reconsider: there's no such thing as one size fits all. Give us the base OS, come up with visualization / features / usability on top, for each device. I know it's tough, but that should be the strategy. So far, on my account, both failed. But again, I might be biased, haven't bought a Win 8 mobile device, they look alien :) As for Ubuntu mobile, Mark, would you please give us back the desktop ?

Above list leads me to the current status quo: I'm stuck :) I cannot move upwards for Ubuntu 14.04, I cannot switch to Fedora (another meh ...), I won't go back to Windows. 7, of course :)

Adding another item to make things worse: the wonderful Cinnamon desktop (which I currently use under Ubuntu 12.04) lost it's apt repo, which means no more updates for me.

I'll probably reconsider Ubuntu 14.04 when I'll get my hand on another TP, so that I will not break everything .... careful with that axe Eugene ...

Edit: time to celebrate my 200th post to the blog ! let's get a beer ...

Worklight 6.1 Studio - linux drill

With my recent downfall into Worklight and understanding the mobile landscape, I installed Worklight 6.1 Studio on my Ubuntu 12.04 LTS 32bit.

After the install ( Eclipse Juno and WL 6.1 plugins ) I started to look around and here's the picture I've got:

a) Eclipse Juno, WL 6.1, WAS LP 8.5.x, IBM's JDK 1.6 forms the local environment which allows one developer to do the work.

Then the developer discovers Google's ADT, ADB and wonders how the heck can he build the Android .apk for the Worklight application

b) Enter ADT plugin for Eclipse, which brings in Adroid SDKs and Android Virtual Devices, with it's tooling. But these require (Sun) Oracle JDK.

So the dilemma here is: how can one developer keep Eclipse Juno with IBM's JDK, while building the Android app with Oracle JDK.

One solution might be creating two Eclipse Juno environments, one with WL 6.1 Studio, another with ADT plugin, both loading the same project. I am yet to test this.

The frustrating thing for Linux Eclipse Juno users (where I discovered the solution in a forum) is that eclipse.ini has to specify Oracle's JDK this form, and this form only [notice the lack of java binary]

-vm
/usr/lib/jvm/jdk1.7.0_51/bin

ubuntu - what I have and what I miss.

I wanted to somehow give a status as to how am I going towards my day-to-day living in Ubuntu 10.04

What I like:

- Notes 8.5.x running from the Windows partition, out-of-the-box, just by edit the /opt/lotus/notes/data/notes.ini on Ubuntu, and set

Directory=/media/win_disk/path_to_notes_data

When booting Ubuntu, after login, I need to remember to open Nautilus in order to mount the Windows partitions. I know this can be done automatically, it didn't bother me so far.

- Rational Software Architect smoothly installed.

- Rational Method Composer just fixed, see the previous post.

- Everything else just works: wireless, VPN's and so on.

What I don't like:

- There's no HTC Sync equiv. for Linux. What the heck, Android is a Linux clone. Well...
- Notes 8 has some font issues which I didn't quite overcome. But I reached a way of getting along with it. I think the next Notes 8.x versions will address that.
- I didn't find a good outliner/personal wiki/whatever in order to keep my knowledge notes. On Windows I had different options, on Linux I am still investigating. So far Basket Note Pads comes rather close, but it's not what I want: keep flat files, rich formatting, easy search

firefox 2 -> 2.0.0.2 upgrade on fedora 6 64bit proc.

having fun with linux ? me too, specially when things finally works.

I upgraded my firefox installation from 2.0 to 2.0.0.2, using :
yum -y -t –enable=development update firefox
(via this)

then imagine what, I found that java plugin was no longer working. While I fixed this when I first installed Fedora Core 6, I have forgotten that running 64bit Firefox will break any 32bit plugin, including Java and Flash.

So, I found myself having the two versions of Firefox (32 and 64bit):

> sudo yum list installed | grep firefox
firefox.x86_64 2.0.0.2-2.fc7 installed
firefox.i386 2.0.0.2-2.fc7 installed

good, it means that by default the 64bit is launched, I needed to launch the 32bit version instead.
What to do ? this article , while shows a how-to for Firefox 1.5, provided the idea: I've made a copy of /usr/bin/firefox and rename it as /usr/bin/firefox-32.sh; then, I've edited the renamed script. I found below declarations and the simple and fast track was to remove the '64' string, so that this firefox-32.sh script would only use /usr/lib instead of /usr/lib64.

##
## Variables
##
MOZ_ARCH=$(uname -m)
case $MOZ_ARCH in
x86_64 | ia64 | s390 )
MOZ_LIB_DIR="/usr/lib64"
SECONDARY_LIB_DIR="/usr/lib"
;;
* )
MOZ_LIB_DIR="/usr/lib"
SECONDARY_LIB_DIR="/usr/lib64"
;;
esac


I'm sure there are more elegant solutions, this one was simple enough and did the trick. Since I used to have all the fancy plugins working (in the 2.0 version), I didn't need to do anything else. It just worked, plain and simple.

linux for an entire sunday

While my fellow blogger Ferdy switched to Ubuntu - called him a 'traitor' as I'm on Fedora, hope he doesn't mind that :) - I'm gonna share with you what I managed to do the entire Sunday.

For a linux security expert like my friend Florin which is handling the www.riss.ro this would have taken 20 minutes ... it took me the entire day. doh ...! But finally I'm quite proud of myself for finally not requesting any help and doing it my own way (google is my friend)

So, here the story goes: my wife (as always, women cause all the trouble ...) choose to add to the house a second computer.

All good for me as I will no longer have to let her share my computer, you say :) Well, yes, that too. But I had to make this second computer share the single IP on my computer, as the provider will not allow two home computers without extra payment. Since I am not going to extra pay for my wife's browsing, I needed to digg into NAT'ing and iptables of my Fedora Core 6 installation.

This is what I did:
- I installed a second network card on my computer and connected with a crossover cable to the second machine. So I have eth0 device with external IP given by the provider, and the eth1 device with 192.168.1.1/24 statically asigned. My wife's computer got the 192.168.1.2/24. This was the easiest part :)
- Testing connection between the two computers, everything works.
- It took me the entire day googling and reading to finally end up with the following /etc/rc.local file:

# add a static route to the internal host (not sure why it didn't worked without it)
/sbin/route add -host 192.168.1.2 dev eth1

#load the NAT module of iptables
modprobe iptable_nat

#tell the system we want to route
echo 1 > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/ip_forward

#mangle with the TTL on eth0. The provider thought that setting TTL=1 would stop me :)
/sbin/iptables -t mangle -A PREROUTING -i eth0 -j TTL --ttl-set 64
/sbin/iptables -t mangle -A OUTPUT -j TTL --ttl-set 64

#enable masquerading (or NAT) between external eth0 and the internal network
iptables -A POSTROUTING -t nat -o eth0 -s 192.168.1.0/24 -d 0/0 -j MASQUERADE
iptables -A FORWARD -t filter -o eth0 -m state --state NEW,ESTABLISHED,RELATED -j ACCEPT
iptables -A FORWARD -t filter -i eth0 -m state --state ESTABLISHED,RELATED -j ACCEPT

#finally, allow DNS queries from internal network
iptables -A OUTPUT -p udp -o eth1 --dport 53 --sport 1024:65535 -j ACCEPT
iptables -A INPUT -p udp -i eth1 --sport 53 --dport 1024:65535 -j ACCEPT

above instructions would be better in another file which could be loaded by /etc/rc.local. However, this did the trick, now I can have the computer for myself :)

I would also evaluate switching to Ubuntu (Ferdy's article triggered the curiosity), however I've done some things on my fedora which would be rather annoying to remember and do again on ubuntu. Then, what is the fun with linux if not digging with google how to do certain things ? If Ubuntu works kind of 'out of the box', I would miss the entire fun of discovering new things :)

For instance, the next challenge on my fedora is to discover how to configure udev and hal to perform automounting and gnome linking of an external usb hdd (80gb) which I've been recently using. Manually mounting works beautifully, but it won't automount. If this would work in Ubuntu, I wouldn't learn about udev and hal, would I ?

up for a new adventure

well yes, a new adventure, this is what I'm calling switching my home desktop into Fedora Core 6.
Still dual booting with windoze for the moment, until I'll get some skills into mangling the linux . Skills which I had about 4 years ago, when I did managed some Domino servers into redhat 6, aix and solaris platforms.

Good old days !

I had some issues though, was not so easy installing, due to some strange hardware: I had an EpoX MB with AMD Sempron 2800+, 2 SATA disks and one IDE. I installed Fedora on the IDE disk, making sure I would not screw my data from the SATA disks (meaning keeping these disks unconnected).
Then, after GRUB modifying into trying to convince it to dual boot, it would not recognized my SATA disks, thus booting Fedora and not Windows :)

I scratched the web for 2 days when I found something related to Epox motherboards and Linux. Seems the SATA controller was lying somehow to GRUB and was not sending the real parameters of the SATA disks, thus GRUB could not boot the Windows.
Solution was to throw away the MB and get a new one, from GigaByte. Together with it I also changed the processor with a AMD Athlon 3000+ on 64bits - as a gift:) and everything is running smooth.

Reinstalled fedora x84_64 this time, which surprisingly comes with the xGL effects I mentioned into a previous post.

I actually feel I'm 5 years younger, there's a lot of new stuff to learn, starting with remembering the vi commands.
I'd like to see how difficult will be to run linux as a desktop, considering I'm not a total newbie. We'll see the following months.