Month: June 2006

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infoq.com – the ‘new’ serverside.com?

www.infoq.com, a software development news and article site, covering Java, .NET, Ruby, SOA and Agile methodologies, officially launched yesterday, after having been running in beta for a while.

The site was co-founded by Floyd Marinescu, who was the original founder of www.theserverside.com, before they merged with Tech Target.

So far I like what I see on infoq – I hope they keep up the momentum and keep the articles coming. This looks a lot like what www.theserverside.com used to be like 4 or 5 years ago. TheServerSide used to be ‘the’ portal site for all things J2EE, but it lost momentum I think after Floyd left, followed by Ed Roman who was the CEO of The Middleware Company, the company behind TheServerSide.com. Since that point I have gradually lost interest in the content on TheServerSide, they usually don’t have anything that catches my eye – they aggregate news story headlines (which I do myself anyway on this site), but they are missing the articles and interviews that they used to have. Plus they used to be a thriving community with many contributions from people in the community – check the site now and see how few submissions they have from anyone other than those connected with the site.

infoq.com on the otherhand looks like they are off to a good start… I’m this close to replacing my TheServerSide.com link with infoq.com …

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Moving to Ubuntu Linux

I’ve dual-booted my laptop for the past few years between XP and Fedora Core Linux, although I had such a hard time setting up the wifi drivers and WPA-Supplicant support that I admit I rarely used Linux on my laptop, despite running my website(s) entirely on Fedora Core Linux.

I decided to download and give Ubuntu Linux a go, since of all the Linuxes I’ve read that this is the most user friendly and easy to setup.

From the 1 CD ISO image (compared to 4+ for Fedora Core), Ubuntu has an awesome approach – you can either boot from the ‘Live CD’ similar to the Knoppix approach and run just from the CD, or select the installation option once you’ve tried it out from the Live CD, and install to your hard drive.

The installation was quick and simple, and all my laptop devices were instantly supported (touchpad mouse etc). The only install issue I had was the ATI driver config for X Windows – it wouldn’t go into 1600×1200 mode without a lot of screen corruption. Following the instructions here solved these issues after following the first section.

There were a couple of quirks – apparently root access is not configured during installation, so you can configure the root password using these instructions.

Secondly, I couldn’t initially find a Java JDK download for Ubuntu, without jumping through hoops to modify a downloaded .rpm file. Fortunately, following on from the JDK license change annoucements at JavaOne2006 this year to make the license more Linux friendly, a Ubuntu-friendly Java5 download is available – instructions here.

Next up – download, install and configure Netbeans, JBoss, and Glassfish, plus Groovy and Grails. I’ll give an update on these later.

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Installing Java5 on Ubuntu Linux 6.06

The Java5 JDK has been packaged as as .deb package ready to install on Ubuntu, without jumping through hoops downloading the RedHat .rpm version and converting to a .deb with the ‘java-package’ utility.

Enable the Multiverse pacakge catalog if you haven’t already done so – in the Software Preferences utility, select ‘Add’ and then select the ‘Multiverse’ option.

You can now install via the Package Manager, or from the command line: sudo apt-get install sun-java5-jdk

Ubuntu comes with the GNU Java compiler which is enabled by default. These instructions walk you through how to select which Java version to run,and how to change between multiple versions, eg gjc to Sun Java5

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