Less is More - Happy Eee PC-ing

Ok - I admit - it was impulse more than utility that made me buy this Asus Eee PC 900. People that know me can confirm that I am not a gadgety type of guy, so I realize it may seem a bit strange that I would sucker into buying trendy hardware.

Well, the secret is: there is no secret. The Eee PC is not a gadget - it is a completely functional laptop that is extremely suitable for traveling. It's got 1G of RAM, and 16G of flash storage onboard. An 900MHz Intel may sound slow, but I haven't really noticed that it is, in fact performance feels pretty peppy. The machine boots *fast* and shuts down even faster. It's light, and small, but still has a keyboard and display that are large enough to work on. The battery lasts me about 2.5 to 3 hours - I will try and find another battery. It cost 300 euros - this price was exactly right for me. If it had been more expensive I probably would not've bought it - even if it'd be a beefier machine.

The Eee PC 900 I bought comes with Xandros linux. I feel they really did a remarkable job of creating a desktop linux that is attractive, clear, easy to use and unwreckable by the non-technical user. The same model is available with windows XP too, but in order to keep the same price they took out Ram and Disk. Please dudes and dudettes - do yourself a favor and don't buy that one. Really, the pre-installed linux is pretty darn good, and considering the clipped hardware specs, I frankly can't see how the same machine with Windows XP could still pass as anything else but a joke. Yeah, I'm biased - trust me, I'm right ;)

If you have some experience with linux, its still easy to set it up so you can use a full KDE desktop.

I used to work on my notebook in packed trains and in cramped planes, but I think I will use the Eee PC instead - it really makes my life easier.

Windows Vista Testdrive: "feedback is not defined" and "open is not a function"

I was just scavenging the web for a decent picture of the Microsoft Windows logo when my eye caught the site www.windowsvistatestdrive.com. I am currently a happy (K)Ubuntu GNU/Linux user, but I decided to give it a spin anyway.

(I know some people have some strong opinions on Linux vs Windows, especially Windows Vista, but to me, the computer and its operating system are just tools to get my work done. I am not a religous person, and god forbid I become religious over something as trivial as the right flavour of computing environment)

Well, the result of my test drive is shown below:



As you can see, I got what looked like a web rendering of Windows Vista...except that opening the page gave me one error immediately:

feedback is not defined

which is kind of a bummer for a site that is designed to sollicit feedback.

I clicked the "start" button anyway, and this gave me the following pearl:

open is not a function

I doubt irony was ever so appropriate ;)

Why webdevelopers should use Linux

Recently, I revamped my old Organization Chart javascript widget to a new version. Since I released this code some time ago I received quite a good deal of email requests from people that are actually using it for their company's intranet site.

On the one hand, it makes me very happy to see people are actually using it for professional purposes. On the other hand, at the time I slapped it together in a few hours total, building on some old experience. As it turned out, users were/are having quite some issues to properly customize their organization charts. I even received some code contributions to improve the functionality.

Now, a few days ago, I finally found some time to address the major issues. But something grave changed in the mean while. When I first created and released the widget, I was a windows user, and used to create stuff that would work on Microsoft Internet Explorer, and then modify it to work on Mozilla/Firefox. Now, it has been about a year since I replaced Microsoft Windows for (K)Ubuntu Linux. Meaning, I am without Internet Explorer....or am I ;)

Enter IEs4Linux:



The IE4sLinux project offers the real, genuine Microsoft Windows Internet Explorer as a Wine emulation:



One of the compelling things about the IE4Linux project is that it allows you to run several versions of MS Internet Explorer on the same machine - something I never got to work on my native windows machine.

Obviously, web developers that need to test their pages on several browsers and browser versions are better off on Linux + Wine than native Windows, as Linux + Wine + IEs4Linux allows them to test their pages on several versions of Internet Explorer.

Thanks to the people from IEs4Linux and Wine!

Compiling MySQL From Source on Linux: Check your Tools

I hear a lot of people say: "Well, compiling MySQL from source might pose a problem to Windows users, but it's straight forward for Linux users." Quite often, the difference is explained by claiming that Linux users are used to doing things themselves, and gaining an extra bit of customization by doing so.

My impression is that a large part of the people that say this, are already quite experienced Linux users that are quite comfortable with compiling software from source. The entire toolchain that is involved is already set up on their system, and some of them probably already forgot what they had to do in order for it to make it work.

What is quite often not mentioned is that the required toolchain does not magically land on your system. If you are experiencing prolems compiling MySQL source it's quite likely the toolchain is broken somewhere.

Those that want to compile MySQL from source on Linux: please take some time to read some of the excellent advise from Jay Pipes. Although rather inconspicously titled Making a Corresponding Test Case for your Patch, his HOWTO contains very important information to set up your building environment.

For those that can't wait:

...here are the things you should have installed to avoid headaches:

* automake version 1.9.6
* autoconf version 2.60
* bison version 2.3
* m4 version 1.4.4
* libtool version 1.5.22
...
Note that it is important what order you install these tools! libtool must be installed last to avoid linking with older versions of the other tools. If you don't, you get weird errors.

I'm running Kubuntu Edgy, and I could get packages for all of these things, except one, Bison. I had to compile that one from source too.