ubuntu

I'm starting to see more and more chatter about a report from MarketWatch about IBM's apparent move to purchase Sun Microsystems; a lot of it centered around people's $favorite_open_source_project and how the ramifications of the deal might affect things in the long term. Personally I see a lot of downsides for open source as a whole if this deal goes through, based on the contrast of Sun's tight control of many of todays most popular open source offerings, and IBM's more general hands off approach.

Soon after they announced, I'd been hoping to take [http://www.google.com/chrome Google Chrome] for a test drive. The [http://www.google.com/googlebooks/chrome/index.html comic book] laid out a lot of interesting things, my favorite being the discussion of separate processes leading to detachable (and "retachable") browser tabs, something I have been touting for **years** as a long term [http://galeon.sourceforge.net/ Galeon] user. My big problem though? I run Linux, and Google has so far left Linux support on the back burner. Still, I figured that someone had probably made a Linux build available by now, so inspired by John McCain's speech on TV tonight, I set about seeing if I could get it set up.



Basically the process now for running Chrome on Linux revolves around getting some advanced [http://www.winehq.org/ Wine] machinery in place (links to follow), and then everything else works like a normal Wine install. One sticking point I ran into is that my Wine was configured as a win2k server, and Google requires WinXP or newer, so I had to reconfigure that before it would install. This was pretty tricky to figure out as there was absolutely zero error messages when trying to install, instead I just got a empty return to prompt. If you're giving it a try, make sure you're configured similarly.



Anyway, after getting it up an running, I ran through a quick checklist of sites I wanted to test; [http://news.google.com/ Google news], [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relational_model Wikipedia], [http://www.slideshare.net/ Slideshare], [http://www.omniti.com/ OmniTI's] website, and several planets all worked fine. I then did some testing of [http://phppgadmin.sourceforge.net/?page=demo phpPgAdmin], and it seemed to work fine. This was a concern I had, given a lack of Apple products on the dev team, we already have enough issues supporting Safari (donations welcome [[image /xzilla/templates/default/img/emoticons/tongue.png alt=":-P" style="display: inline; vertical-align: bottom;" class="emoticon" /]]), and now PHP developers (really all web developers) now have yet another browser they can expect bug reports from. Yippee! But again, it worked well, and we have some fairly complicated javascript going on with the tree menu, so that seems good.



All in all I am happy with the experiment. I don't suspect I will really use it with any regularity, but it is interesting to play with (and who knows, maybe upgrading wine will make [http://www.phunland.com/wiki/Home phun] run better). If you'd like to get it running on your Linux, I've put a screenshot and the help links I used after the jump; they're mostly Ubuntu specific, but should be easily ported to other flavors.






[[image http://people.planetpostgresql.org/xzilla/uploads/chrome-screenshot.png alt="Chrome on Ubuntu"]]



primary link I used was

[http://www.myscienceisbetter.info/2008/09/install-google-chrome-on-linux-using-wine.html http://www.myscienceisbetter.info/2008/09/install-google-chrome-on-linux-using-wine.html]



the other links I looked at while going through the above were:

[http://www.winehq.org/site/download-deb http://www.winehq.org/site/download-deb]

[http://wiki.winehq.org/winetricks http://wiki.winehq.org/winetricks]

[http://www.nabble.com/winetricks-help-td18006498.html http://www.nabble.com/winetricks-help-td18006498.html]

[http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=908493&page=7 http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=908493&page=7]

Ok, in an effort to get people to stop harassing me about a lack of posting during [http://www.PGCon.org/2008/ PGCon], I now present to you my official PGCon wrap up. I'm skipping the technical breakdown on talks for the most part, you can get their slides from the conference site (and yes, I have uploaded both the [http://www.PGCon.org/2008/schedule/events/97.en.html anti-pattern] slides and the [http://www.PGCon.org/2008/schedule/events/60.en.html lightning talk slides]), but I did jot down some notes during last week on some items I thought were worth mentioning. The biggest thing to come out of this past week to me was recognition of the continued growth of the postgresql community. With a number of [http://www.postgresqlconference.org/ regional] [http://www.pgday.org/it/ conferences] springing up over the past year, I wondered if PGCon would be able to match the experience from last time, and was happy to see that it far exceeded it. That said, here are some other thoughts and ideas from the week that was PGCon 2008.






Technical Highlights:

If you're not sure where to begin with technical content, my three favorite talks from the conference were probably ITAGAKI Takahiro's [http://www.pgcon.org/2008/schedule/events/76.en.html Synchronous Log Shipping Replication], Josh's [http://www.pgcon.org/2008/schedule/events/104.en.html GUC Tour] (even though he chastised me for attending since I already knew all the material), and Greg's [http://www.pgcon.org/2008/schedule/events/60.en.html DBIx:Cache Lightning talk] (Greg, send me the code!). Of course there were a lot of other good talks, but I think those three left the biggest impression on me.



Personal Highlights:

Lots of people get different things out of conferences like this. I was happy to once again meet some folks in the community who I hadn't met before [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_real_life irl], including Tom Dunstan (who I oddly had not pictured as being Australian), Guillaume `ioguix` de Rorthais, Dave Cramer, and Susanne Ebrecht, among others. I do need to say a personal thanks to Stephen Frost for carting my butt around town, Aaron Thule for keeping me off the streets; the Skype guys for hooking me up with a "Skype DBA Team" shirt, and Hiroshi Saito for hooking me up with a fabulous set of chopsticks (As soon as I opened these at home, I snagged a few pieces of Peanut Butter Cap'n Crunch from the box and they worked with no problem, quite awesome).



Community Take-away:

Of course you can't get that many postgres folks together and not discuss different facets of the PostgreSQL community. One thing I noted was that we have a very large presence of Postgres in Ottawa, I think larger than what we had at PGEast for the Baltimore/Washington Area. Surprisingly, Ottawa doesn't have a postgres users group yet, so it would be nice to see someone step up and get that going. Speaking of, looks like there will be two new user groups forming, one for Toronto, and one for Oklahoma (To be headed by Emilie Steele, whom I had the pleasure of hanging out with at the Airport on Saturday).



Another thought on the community level was we need to continue to make bridges into other development communities. Most of the folks I talked with seemed to think that the incidents of unfriendly responses to newbies looking for help (the flamey/petty type responses about people who use windows or php or java or ) have mostly gone away. I feel stronger than most that there is still too much of this going on in the postgres community, but it seemed good to hear others didn't see as much of a problem. For anyone left who is inclined to turn their nose up at others, the general thinking was "get over yourself".



Announcements:

In the world of conference promotions, many conference holders try to bill their conference as **the event** at which to make all of the big announcements to gather the most eyeballs. I don't think Dan really plays that game, but it was interesting to see several big announcements were made during the conference this year, including [http://www.informationweek.com/news/software/database/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=207801436 Yahoo's Peta-Byte database], the widespread launch of the [http://www.postgresrocks.com Postgres Rocks] campaign, and the announcement of [http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-announce/2008-05/msg00012.php 2nd Quadrant's Italian division]. Congrats folks, if this keeps up we may need to make some adjustments on the pgcon schedule to keep people apprised of things.



Adjustments:

Speaking of adjustments for next year, I want to remind everyone to fill out the speaker feedback forms. We try to adjust talks each year based on the feedback we get from others. Also if you have general topic suggestions or other feedback, please let us know that too. Based on the current feedback, I think we'll likely have a talk on MVCC next year, and also try to lean more towards talks with more practical application, such as talks on [http://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/interactive/sql-explain.html explain] or [http://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/interactive/app-psql.html psql] or similar.



TODO list:

Up next for me is Portland PGDay & OSCon, both at the end of July in Portland. Between now and then I've aquired several TODO items, including working on the various dtrace probe proposals, updating a bunch of web changes, and getting things moving on phppgadmin. I also want to push out some more code form various projects we're working on at OmniTI, and somewhere I need to do some work to square my laptop situation away (Ubuntu 8.04 has been a step backwards for me from 6.06, but I'm unsure in which direction I want to step forward).

I upgraded my laptop to [http://www.ubuntu.com/ Ubuntu 6.06 LTS] last night (from breezy). For the most part everything went pretty smooth, though I noticed all my networking stuff was hosed up this morning, but I think that was a problem with my router and not the laptop itslef.



At one point during the upgrade I got some crazy message trying to explain that PostgreSQL 8.0 and how to upgrade to 8.1. This didn't seem right to me, since 8.0 is still supported (moreso than naught) by the upstream project, and I thought part of the point of doing all the [http://igbt.sel.eesc.usp.br/cgi-bin/man/man2html?1+pg_lsclusters ls-clusters stuff] was to run multiple pg versions side by side. (Admitidly I haven't had much success with that so far, but in theory at least).



Oh well, I'll keep an eye on things the next few days and see how it goes...this is certainly more successful than the various red hat upgrades I had done in the past, so for that I fell pretty good.

Quick pointer for the curious (or more likely so I can look it up later), to install PostgreSQL 8.1 on Ubuntu Breezy, you need to add the following to /etc/apt/sources.list:



deb http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu breezy-backports main restricted universe multiverse



you can then fire up symantic and reload your package list and go about with the installation.