Oct 21 2008

TWiki 4.2.3 Windows installer update

Tag: enterprise, perl, twiki, twikiapplication — Sven Dowideit @ 3:39 pm

TWiki 4.2 for windows - with fully integrated native installers that will update your Computer with perl, apache and other tools needed to run TWiki.

The first of these installers released is the  Windows TWiki installer, and includes

  1. Apache 2.2, (apache_2.2.10-win32-x86-openssl-0.9.8i.msi)
  2. ActiveState Perl (ActivePerl-5.8.8.824-MSWin32-x86-287188.msi)
  3. Gnu Grep
  4. Gnu rcs
  5. Vanilla TWiki 4.2.3.

If the installer detects that you already have the same version (or later) of apache, perl, grep or rcs installed, it will only install the needed components. TWiki is installed into c:\Program Files\TWiki. The main change to the installer is that it now tries to detect non-English ‘Program Files’ directories and install into the right place.

Please download it, try it out and report your impressions, gripes, bugs and successes here on TWiki.org, or in the TWiki Bugs system.

Another TWiki innovation brought to you by fosiki, a  WikiRing.com founding partner.

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Oct 12 2008

older releases of Solaris 10

Tag: enterprise, perl, solaris, twiki — Sven Dowideit @ 10:06 pm

If like me, you’re looking for an older release of Solaris - so you can replicate a client’s setup, you can find them at http://www.sun.com/software/solaris/releases.jsp

I couldn’t find it without help - as Sun’s web site is a study in how to make things impossible to find.

Now to install Solaris 10 update 3 (11/06) on my old ultra sparc 5 - yep, 10 year old tech. its been sitting in the garage for the last year or so, but as its built like a tank, it seems to start fine. I do wish the 10K 18.4G Quantum cheetah wasn’t quite such a painful noise though.

My client chooses to use the http://www.sunfreeware.com/ packages - which means that to get Perl 5.8.8 humming (and subversion so I could commit TWiki fixes), required me to install:

  • db-4.2.52.NC-sol10-sparc-local
  • diffutils-2.8.1-sol10-sparc-local
  • expat-2.0.1-sol10-sparc-local
  • gcc-3.4.6-sol10-sparc-local
  • gdbm-1.8.3-sol10-sparc-local
  • grep-2.5.1a-sol10-sparc-local
  • libiconv-1.9.2-sol10-sparc-local
  • libintl-3.4.0-sol10-sparc-local
  • libxml2-2.6.31-sol10-sparc-local
  • make-3.81-sol10-sparc-local
  • ncftp-3.2.1-sol10-sparc-local
  • neon-0.25.5-sol10-sparc-local
  • neon-0.28.3-sol10-sparc-local
  • openssl-0.9.8i-sol10-sparc-local
  • pcre-7.8-sol10-sparc-local
  • perl-5.8.8-sol10-sparc-local
  • rcs-5.7-sol10-sparc-local
  • subversion-1.4.4-sol10-sparc-local
  • swig-1.3.36-sol10-sparc-local
  • wget-1.11.4-sol10-sparc-local
  • zlib-1.2.3-sol10-sparc-local

and after all that, I’m having weird spillover issues with CPAN, caused by having the built in Perl 5.8.4 in the PATH before /usr/local/bin/perl (the 5.8.8)

So if you have more than one Perl installed, and want to use CPAN - BE CAREFUL to set the PATH to use your desired Perl’s path first - calling it directly will lead to problems.

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Sep 25 2008

Open source culture clash

Tag: enterprise, open source, twiki — Sven Dowideit @ 8:25 pm

Larry Augustin talks about the difference in how open source is selected and perceived between the US and Europe - roughly boiling down to:

US companies see Open source as a free ride they can take to getting their millions, whereas Europeans see Open source as a way to reduce risk, and localise expertise.

In many things Australia follows the US examples - but with their economy imploding due to criminally negligent stupidity, and the Australian government contemplating a 50% tax rebate for companies that work on open source - perhaps things are looking up here.

The TWiki.org open source project has a governance crisis for exactly this mismatch reason. The main code contributors for the last 5 years have been, well, me and Crawford Currie - both of us with very European ideals for the project, and most of the users and other contributors feel the same way. Then, last year, Peter, the project founder found some angel funding to build a startup to capitalize on his ownership of the trademark - very much in the US open source way.

This isn’t being handled cleverly enough PR wise - most likely because the ‘US’ open source style companies aren’t even aware that they are behind.

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Sep 08 2008

TWiki Summit 2008Q3 in Berlin

Tag: twiki, wiki — Sven Dowideit @ 8:30 pm

I wasn’t able to travel from Sydney, Australia to Berlin for this summit - which means I’ve missed all 3 of them so far :(.

I was able to listen in on the conference calls made for the governance discussions, and was quite amazed at the strong commonality in the communities approaches and desires. I guess spending over 5 years talking over the same frustrations, and attempting solutions to them brings everyone on board extremely cohesively.

An amazing thing was that with Tom Barton (CEO) there, we heard from yet another TWIKI.NET decision maker that they were not aware of the feelings of the community - extremely scary for a startup that alleges to be working in the interests of the community.

Next major hurdle seems to be trademark control - Peter owns the ‘TWiki’ trademark, and TWIKI.NET wants to leverage that to gain an advantage in the TWiki community. It seems to me that the best response is for the community to avoid the issue - by doing what WireShark did when faced by a similar issues with the ‘Ethereal’ trademark - Rename and Re-brand the open source project.

There seems hope that things may not come to that - the second and final day saw the election of an Interm council to guide TWiki to a lasting democratic setup.

Either way, there is definitely cause to be optimistic about the project known as TWiki. Many thanks to Kenneth of Motorola for organising and hosting the Summit.

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Aug 20 2008

ever had Perl CPAN not work on your debian, even though you installed make etc?

Tag: debian, dtrace, enterprise, new, perl, solaris, twiki — Sven Dowideit @ 4:29 pm

CPAN, while incredibly useful, can be a pain, if you forget that you need to re-configure it after installing essential tools.

For example, if you make the mistake of setting up a basic, non-development Debian virtual machine, configure CPAN, try to use it, and on seeing ‘make’ errors like (from install Bundle::CPAN of all things) :

Running make test
Can't test without successful make
Running make install
make had returned bad status, install seems impossible
Running install for module Compress::Raw::Zlib
Running make for P/PM/PMQS/Compress-Raw-Zlib-2.012.tar.gz
Is already unwrapped into directory /root/.cpan/build/Compress-Raw-Zlib-2.012
Has already been processed within this session
Running make test
Can't test without successful make
Running make install
make had returned bad status, install seems impossible
Running make for P/PM/PMQS/IO-Compress-Zlib-2.012.tar.gz
Is already unwrapped into directory /root/.cpan/build/IO-Compress-Zlib-2.012
Has already been processed within this session
Running make test
Can't test without successful make
Running make install
make had returned bad status, install seems impossible

cpan>

You install make apt-get update ; apt-get install build-essential…, only to continue to see the same errors wizz past….

CPAN really truly needs to realise that the make settings are mis configured, and tell you.

What you need to do, is to tell your cpan about it by running:
cpan> o conf init

OR, if you’ve not yet messed (configured) up your cpan, install build-essential first.

And while you’re contemplating using cpan, think hard about trying dh-make-perl instead :)

Ideally, CPAN should be able to realise that it can’t call make if it does not know where it is - and point this fact out, rather than making it appear as though the package being installed has an issue.

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Aug 17 2008

Beware Perl Encode.pm v2.25 when updating TWiki 4.2.2 or WysiwygPlugin

Tag: new, perl, twiki, wiki — Sven Dowideit @ 11:19 pm

I just ran across a pretty annoying issue when updating one of my TWiki’s from 4.2.0 to 4.2.2. The server it is on was running Perl 5.10, but the Encode module was 2.25, resulting in Wysiwyg edits having all their spaces replaced with %20, and line feeds %0A ala

%20Debian%20equivalent%20of%20chkconfig%0A%0A/usr/sbin/update-rc.d%20avahi-daemon%20defaults%0A%0Ahttp%3A//wiki.linuxmce.org/index.php/Hardware%0A

(look familiar Martin? :))


perl -MCPAN -e shell
>upgrade Encode

Got me to Encode v2.26, which fixed it for me.

update: Martin’s just confirmed that it didn’t help him on perl 5.8.4, so perhaps its an odd combination of outdated modules?

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