Scott Kleihege's Journal Recent Entries

Thanks to contributions from Ben Chapman and Jason Knight at Emory University, instructions for installing Tomcat 5 on CentOS 4 with JDK 1.5 are available here. Using packages from Jpackage.org combined with two non-redistributable Java binaries, gives you the benefits of simpler installation, removal, upgrading, and file verification that RPM packages provide.

As of November 1st, 2005, debian testing has finally switched to a new version of apt that uses gpg key signatures for secure verification of packages (see the announcement). Unfortunately, package updates released since the new year have been signed with a new key, causing some error messages when updating.

Here's the error message I saw when trying to apply the most recent updates:

# apt-get update
Get:1 http://mirrors.tummy.com testing Release.gpg [378B]
Hit http://mirrors.tummy.com testing Release
Hit http://mirrors.tummy.com testing/main Packages
Hit http://mirrors.tummy.com testing/main Sources
Fetched 378B in 0s (3567B/s)
Reading package lists... Done
W: GPG error: http://mirrors.tummy.com testing Release: The following 
signatures couldn't be verified because the public key is not available: 
NO_PUBKEY 010908312D230C5F
W: You may want to run apt-get update to correct these problems

Due to licensing issues, installing Java base packages on Linux is several orders of magnitude more difficult than packages which are included in your distribution's base, or even software from some third party repositories. The good people at JPackage.org have gone to a lot of effort to make it pretty easy to install Java packages on RPM-based machines. Sadly, unless Sun decides to start allowing for free redistribution of it's packages, it still requires some manual installation.

Here at tummy.com, we're big fans of the Qemu PC hardware emulator. With RPMs of Qemu and the kernel accelerator available from FedoraNews.org, Qemu has never been easier or faster!

For the most part, debian documentation is good. However, this week, while trying to setup a third-party repository for testing our debian/ubuntu port of vPostMaster, I discovered that the documentation for setting up a new apt repository leaves something to be desired. Unfortunately, this documentation is sorely needed; compared with the command to setup a yum repository for Red Hat, setting up a debian repository is quite user-unfriendly.

We've started maintaining a few FreeBSD systems, so I wrote up a document on keeping them up-to-date with kernel, system and package updates using the ports system. It's a fairly generic document, it assumes that some packages have already been installed, and is aimed at an audience that already has some administrative experience. If it's helpful, feel free to comment.

I'm proud to announce that I've built a FreeBSD port of heartbeat that I hope will soon be included in the official ports repository.

We've been getting requests to setup the latest and greatest MySQL server (4.1) recently. As of this time, Red Hat Fedora Core 1, 2 and 3 use MySQL version 3. The fresh installation of MySQL 4.1 on Fedora systems is pretty painless.
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