FOSS to the rescue

What to do when a client sends you multiple 500Meg DBF files and you want to move them into PostgreSQL? Why you find a FOSS solution of course.

http://www.tv.com.pl/stepbystep/dbasepsql/

Seems to be a problem for us in the program seeing all the DBF files in the dbf folder but it works if you list them in the properties file. Pretty darn quick, runs in Java so multiplatform, source code included in case you want to change it, and it gives you both a DDL and a data file.

Life is good…

Seeing the linux filesystem in a windows vm using VirtualBox

YES! Victory is mine!

This screenshot shows how to mount a linux folder inside of a windows guest vm. So now I can load up my windows software in the VM and I can edit them on my linux FS.

The instructions are in the help file for “Folder Sharing”. The key point is making sure to install the software on the windows VM.

Loving it (in case you couldn’t tell)

What does the beginning of freedom look like

Take a look at this image and stand in awe -

This is the beginning of freedom for me. The astute members in the group will notice I am rocking windows in VirtualBox ( a FOSS virtualization application, so this might bring Sean some joy) on my Ubuntu x64 8.10 machine (more to follow on building the machine later). ArcGIS Desktop runs as fast as I would expect on a normal windows box. But you know what this means to me – I don’t have to mess up my registery, I can use rsync natively to sync files among my server and desktop, I am getting closer to running my rig the way I want – FOSS baby.

As for VirtualBox, I can not reccomend it enough – small download, easy to install, runs on windows, linux, mac, and solaris, can host a ton-o-guest type of OSs, easy to run, very lightweight, can run vmware images, has good docs, supported by a large corporation that cares about virtualization, it’s free, and it’s open source.

I can now keep all my ArcGIS + Visual Studio stuff in a virtual machine and not have it bog down my laptop or make my desktop machine windows only. Hip Hip Hooray!

[UPDATE - instructions on moving to vBox 2.1  on Ubuntu 8.1, which among other things support 64-bit guests on 32-bit hosts – yeah baby

Project for this week – centOS

I used to use e-apps as my old hosting company and I notice they moved from Fedora to centOS. So I go to the centOS home page and realize that is an open source compilation of the source code for Red Hat Enterpise System (RHES). WHOOAAAA NELLLLY. At first I am a bit skeptical, so I go to the IRC channel (#centos on freenode) and start asking around. Lo and behold this really is RHES just rebranded for centOS. Since I have experience adminning RHES machines this makes me very happy. I was thinking of taking ubuntu for a spin but I was also intrigued by Solaris (two fine open source operating systems). But this let’s me use applications that are certitifed for use on RHES as well as all the other applications that have RPM installs. The reason the certified application should work is that centOS is binary compatible with the latest version of RHEL. One developer told me his company uses centOS internally for development but only certifies on RHEL.

Apparently they use yum for the installer making the patching process better than up2date. So for now I am going to be trying it out and see how well it goes.

Can I also use this opportunity to point out how frickin’ awesome BitTorrent is! I go home last night and start up the swarm from a seed at Stanford, and 2 hours later I have pulled down 2.2 gigs of ISOs. My DSL is 3meg down 500k up. I could not even imagine how long this would have taken over plain old http. All hail the collective!

Update so far today:

The installer was easy cheesy, just like on RHES. The machine is an IBM 6229-22U, which means a 2.2 P4 with a nvidia quadro dual head card, and it has 1 gig of Rambus RAM (page 36 on this document). I chose the kitchen sink install (I think they use a tackle box icon) just so I don’t have to mess with installing other packages later. If I was outside a firewall with multiple users I would be more discriminating in the packages I chose to install. But since it is just my dev box I would rather have the package there and not have to go find it.

After reboot everything came up fine and works great. I do need to look at getting yum to work through the proxy server here at work. I changed the config file to use the proxy server but now it is failing on md5 checksums. Time to dig in…

Yippe for me – I have a unix box under my desk again.