This Old Blog

It's been a while since I touched my personal Android 4 repository hosted on my aging Latitude D630 and its Fedora 14 installation. I started hosting (and building) Android 4 just to get the experience in handling that particular project, as well as creating my own version of ICL to run on my Nook Color (Encore). The directions were initially written for CyanogenMod 7.x (Gingerbread) but are still pretty accurate (for the most part) for CyanogenMod 9.x (Ice Cream Sandwich). The only problem being the following: After performing repo sync (which is what I started with this time), during the build process, I ran into a build-halting error where libjackpal-androidterm4.so could not be found. Sure enough I didn't have that, just the earlier libjackpal-androidterm3.so. Looking around a bit on the internets I found the solution: right before build cd into cm/vendor and execute get-prebuilts . This will unpack term.apk and give you the correct library to build against. DO NOT d...

Verdict: not so tasty I grabbed all the Mono packages via YaST and installed them without problems. I then fired up monodevelop in a terminal so I could watch for warnings and errors. I'm glad I did. I won't bore you with screen shots of creating a simple 'Hello world' application. I will say that monodevelop is crashy. For example, without having created anything, I attempted to see what the Classes tab on the left side of the IDE would produce if opened. Normally it should be blank; that's what every other IDE in the known universe shows. Instead MonoDevelop crashed and exited. Hmmm... After the second startup I created the simple 'Hello World' project as a console program with Gtk# extensions. I didn't add any other code. I then had the project build and run within the IDE. During that entire time I got a stream of error messages, such as the following sample: ERROR [2008-12-22 10:49:57Z]: Mono.CompilerServices.SymbolWriter.MonoSymbolFileException: Ca...

I like maps. Old, new, hand-drawn, or digital. I like the stories they tell. An offshoot of this fascination with maps is a fascination with the images sent back by probes sent to nearly all the planets of our solar system, including Earth. The two most interesting (for me) applications for viewing Earth images are Google Maps (GM) and Nasa's World Wind (WW) application. I recently installed World Wind 1.4 and went zooming around the Earth with it. It's slick. On my notebook the response to moving over the surface or zooming in or out is silky smooth and immediate. While I had WW up I decided to compare its satellite imaging with Google Maps. While the majority of sites look identical or nearly identical, some of the sites under World Wind are deliberately obfuscated to the point where, if you want a clear image, you're better off using Google Maps. First example, my favorite paranoia place, Area 51 . The first image is from WW, the second from GM. GM has matured since it...

Booting Knoppix allowed me to play with a number of applications bundled with the distribution. One of them was MonoDevelop, the Mono C# IDE. I was intrigued with the prospect of being able to create cross-platform applications in C# that could be developed equally on Linux using MonoDevelop as well as on Windows using Visual Studio 2005. What I discovered is that MonoDevelop is a simplistic development IDE at best. If you want a powerful IDE under C#, then it's best to stick with Visual Studio under Windows. For other languages, such as Java, there are alternatives to powerful and complete cross-platform editing. I started this simple experiment under Windows XP on my notebook with VS2005. I wanted to create a complete project with solution file that I could then attempt to open under MonoDevelop running on Linux. I followed a Microsoft walk-through (similar to a Java trail) that allowed me to create a very simple C# application with a single window and some controls. You see it ...

It's impossible to write a decent review of any complex distribution, let alone Knoppix. These few posts are a quick pass at features that caught my eye while I had Knoppix up and running. This time I'm going to look at two IDEs, Eclipse and MonoDevelop . Everybody should know what Eclipse is by now. Along with Sun's NetBeans , it's one of two of the best open and free IDEs on the market. Eclipse, written in Java, started life as a Java IDE. Over time it has grown into a development platform for C and C++, SQL (and database management in general), various dynamic languages such as Perl, Python, Php, and Ruby, as well as software engineering in general. NetBeans is following a similar path. As significant as it is to find Eclipse, it's also notable that NetBeans is not a part of Knoppix. Let me also note that Java 5 is bundled with Knoppix, but not Java 6, which was released in November 2006. The version of Eclipse bundled with Knoppix 5.1 is the latest release, 3...