I've got Mono 2.0 updated and packaged up for Fink unstable. It includes Cocoa#, Gtk#, and MonoDevelop 1.0, all tested and working.
Congratulations to the Mono team on getting 2.0 released!
Recently in MacOSX Category
Just a quick note to say that based on these instructions, I was able to get Google Chrome running on Mac OS X, using Fink.
You'll need to enable unstable ("fink configure", followed by "fink selfupdate-rsync"), and then do a "fink install wine cabextract". Then start at the "offline installer" part of the instructions.
Woot!
Do you see that picture on the right? I bought Windows XP when it came out. An actual legitimate copy of Windows XP Home Edition. It promised a lot of things that it eventually pretty much delivered after a couple of service packs. It's moved from machine to machine as I've updated hardware. I've gotten rid of basically all of my old PC hardware and now it lives on my Macbook Pro. I've been reasonably happy with it. Except...
With such a long history, I've long-since passed the time when Microsoft accepted my key without question through internet activation. Do you know what happens when you pass that time? Painful crushing phone activation.
Observe:
First, you have to call a number, and enter 9 sets of 6 digits (they're kind enough to let you use the touch-tone phone to do it, instead of braving their voice recognition system). Then, on the 9th set, it always complains that it didn't understand the last set of digits, until you're forced to tell it to forward you to a human without finishing the automated input.
Then, since it didn't actually record all of those numbers you put in, you get to read them again to the call-center person.
Then, they read a string of numbers back to you, that you have to type in, and finally, in true Microsoft fashion, you hit "Next", followed by "Finish", because it wouldn't be Windows without a wizard with a few extra unnecessary clicks. ;)
Have you seen what you have to do to activate a pirated version of of Windows XP? I did a quick Google search out of curiosity. You use a pre-made serial number, and then run a command that will do the activation for you, and one more command to trick Windows Genuine Advantage(TM). Voila!
It's sad that I find it so tempting to pirate something I legally own just because it's so frustrating to activate the damn thing.
The best part is, the only reason I had to re-activate at all was because the logic board went bad in my MacBook Pro, and Windows no longer recognized it as the hardware it was installed on.
Even better, now that it's done, I have to re-activate every time I switch from booting in VMware to booting natively through Boot Camp, or vice-versa.
Alternatively, you know what I had to do to register my copy of Mac OS X when I installed it? Nothing. Imagine that.
With the help of a number of folks, I'm happy to announce the latest KDE/Mac snapshot, based on KDE 4.1 Beta 1. Also, while it's been available for a while, I'd like to point out that KDE/Mac now has an official website, at mac.kde.org, using Benjamin Dietrich's pretty design.
Torrents are all seeded, and downloadable.
Note: Apparently bittorrent doesn't preserve executable flags. :( Before installing, run, in a terminal:
chmod a+x *.pkg/Contents/Resources/postflight
As always, questions are welcome in the comments, on the kde-mac list, or in a bug report. =)
Now that KDE 3.5.9 is out, I've updated all of the Fink KDE/X11 packages to match it. Nothing new specific to Mac OS X or Fink, just a version bump with some bugfixes and a significantly updated kdepim.
It also includes a few things that are updated to understand Chris's new libflac package.
As always, let me know if you run into any issues.
I've submitted some patches to D-Bus to allow it to auto-launch on Mac OS X. This should let me remove some completely awful and distribution-specific code from kdelibs.
It's got a few quirks to work out, but on 10.5, it's rockin'! Even scarier, I wrote C code. I think it might even be halfway decent C code. Time to look out, Armageddon is clearly happening any day now. :)
Oh, and as an aside, this is the first time I've actually had to break down and finally learn how to use Git, since that's what dbus uses, and it's friggin' amazing. Lightning fast, and well-suited to sending patches upstream.
If there's one thing I know about people who are involved in network management, it's that they're stats junkies. Case in point. (Hah, I mean, how cool is it to poll the weather in OpenNMS...) I put that to the test in the last week, most definitely.
I got slashdotted (and ars technica'd, and dugg) a few days ago, and despite being under the weather, it fired me up to do 2 things.
First of all, it got me excited about working on KDE more. I had a great time at the KDE 4.0 release event and for the first time got strong feedback from KDE folks on what I've been working on. I got a little bit of that at aKademy but I also still felt quite a bit like the outsider there. This time around there were a number of people who gave me great feedback, encouragement, and all-around made me feel like a part of the community.
As a result, the thing I'd hoped would happen most after getting the press did happen -- the kde-darwin IRC channel is hoppin' with people not only willing to help test things and give bug reports, but willing to dig into the code, and help out in other ways. (One guy is designing a sweet web site that will hopefully be at mac.kde.org when we can get the administrative stuff handled.) And as for testers... well, there've been at least 1200 people who have completed downloading the "everything" torrent!
Second of all, I obsessively watched my web page and download stats. I can't help it, I love watching the graphs go crazy.
We, of course, monitor my web site with OpenNMS. However, I've recently switched to a new server at my hosting provider and I hadn't noticed that I wasn't monitoring the new machine. So thanks, ars technica, for getting me to monitor my new server. The cobbler's children finally got some shoes. ;)
I also use Google Analytics for web-site tracking. You can see in the graph on the right the difference between last week and this week. (Last week is the little green bit at the bottom of the graph...) This week I've had over 13,000 unique visitors, when about 1,500 is the norm. That's just crazy!
And on that subject, Tarus and I were talking about a bug reported to the discuss list related to my recent changes to the OpenNMS RPM packages. Tarus joked that "at least two people are running nightly snapshots" which, of course, got me thinking, "Hmm, our Yum downloads aren't recorded on SourceForge, I wonder how many snapshot users we do have..."
I figured it would be maybe 20 or 30 people brave enough to run the nightly version of OpenNMS. Boy was I wrong. A quick grep through the logs shows that since we started doing snapshots, we've had almost 8 thousand snapshot downloads, from 900 unique hosts. That's not people running the latest release, that's people running whatever nightly code got checked in the day before. Granted, we do a pretty good job of making sure trunk is always usable, but "usable" is not the same as "regression tested" nor "proven in the field."
All I can say is, thanks to everyone willing to try things out, it's great to see that we've got that many people willing to be on the front lines making sure our software works.
The future, Ranger Rick?
That's right, dear reader. Let's look to the future, all the way to the year 2000!"
So, in preparation for working on becoming an officially-supported part of KDE, I'm starting to move "my" project information into someplace that makes it easier to get the community's involvement.
First, I've gone ahead and moved the wiki stuff to KDE techbase.
Next up is starting to offer up the torrents on ftp.kde.org, but I need to get access to it again.
And hopefully soon, we can get a proper KDE mailing list set up, rather than the occasional post to kde-nonlinux.
Just in time for the KDE release event (grin) -- a new KDE/Mac snapshot is available. I will be demoing it at the release event, thanks to Google and the KDE release coordinators for arranging free lodging, and my employer, OpenNMS, for covering my travel!
On to info about the snapshots.
Qt is updated to 4.3.3, and my build tools have been updated to use the KDE 4.0 branch now that 4.0.0 has been tagged. This does mean that kdepim and kdevelop are no longer being built (for now). Also, I'm not building Amarok right now since it has some compile issues, and I need to get with the Amarok folks to figure out what to do about some architectural issues (no Plasma on OSX).
Nothing huge code-wise has changed from a Mac point of view, other than all of the general updates that have gone on in the KDE codebase since the last snapshot. It appears that kdeinit4 and kded4 both have some crashing issues related to something deep in Qt, I will be investigating it when time permits. In the meantime, a lot of apps still work. Notably, KOffice apps appear to work now! In fact, KSpread is looking pretty darn good.
The torrents are still in the process of uploading to my seed servers, I've got most of them finished but a few are still going, and the "everything" torrent is still going, so if you're impatient, grab the individual packages of the stuff you want for best results. Note that I will be traveling to San Jose for the release event today, so you may see the torrents stop updating for a while but I will resume them as soon as possible.
As always, comments and questions are welcome, just send me an e-mail or reply in the comments here.
Figured it'd been a while since I did a general "status" post about what's been going on.
First and foremost, as I mentioned before, much of my spare time has gone into fixing up the Fink package database. It's now much easier on our web server, and uses a combination of PHP and a really spiffy Lucene-based full-text search engine called "Solr."
Also, I did some work on making Fink play nicer with the new Xquartz releases. It's still in testing, but in the meantime, their 2.1.1 release provides a workaround to allow Fink users on Leopard to run without issue.
I've also been wearing my OpenNMS.com hat recently, and am working on some spiffy customer-management tools for keeping track of our support work better. I'm a big fan of Ruby on Rails, and am mocking it up in that -- on top of JRuby, of course.
In the process, of getting my development system set up to do rails development, I updated all of the Fink packages for rails 2.0 and related stuff, as well as taking over rubygems from the previous maintainer. They're now all up-to-date, and I've been doing my rails development with a purely fink-based ruby/rails install, which is nice.
Plenty of other stuff got updated or added as well:
- ack
- cairo
- mediatomb (fixed on Leopard)
- net-snmp-unified (fixed on Leopard)
- opennms (finally updated to 1.3.9)
- postgis
- postgresql
- radlib
