ASP, XSP, Apache, mod_mono and Fedora 20

It's been a while since I posted here. I've not given up on my project, in fact I'm still very happy with Linux and the Fedora distribution. I've just not been doing anything particularly interesting with it recently.

So why the post? Well I've come into contact with an ASP project I need to make some changes to.

PHP? fine, it runs under Apache.
Java? no problem, I can run that under Tomcat.

So I've landed myself a bit of work on an old website, yay. The site is running on ASP of some sort, boo.

Of course I'm running Fedora with Apache not Windows with IIS.

A bit of reading leads me to all sorts of old pages about XSP and running mod_mono under Apache. I tried getting mod_mono to interpret the asp scripts I've downloaded, but Apache can't find mod_mono plugin.

I really don't care if ASP ends up running under Apache or some other server, in fact in some ways I'd rather use a standalone ASP server. Which is where XSP comes in.

XSP is a small service/server that should enable serving up of ASP scripts as I understand it.

Installed ok with yum. Then when it comes to running it, it seems to be a simple matter of running it in the project directory.

At localhost:8080 I get a 404 page which is clearly being served up by the xsp server, so that appears to be running at least.

When I try to hit one of the scripts (localhost:8080/default.asp), rather than getting anything vaguely like a nice webpage, I get the ASP code as text. So no ASP processing has occurred.

There is no output in the terminal running the server, nor in the /var/log directory.

This one could run for a while I suspect....

Adding fonts in Fedora 17

I had a graphic designer produce a banner for me a while back. Of course the font he used isn't part of the standard Linux font packages (AFAIK), so I had find a way to add it to my machine.

I was expecting a nice easy, drop into font directory style of installation. Well it was pretty much that easy.

Copied the .ttf file to /usr/share/fonts
As root, run fc-cache. Use the -v flag to get a list of what gets noticed then you will see if your new font gets picked up.

I put mine in /usr/share/fonts/local to keep the ones I add separate from those installed by Fedora.

DigiKam and Fedora 17

Since Picasa support for Linux has been withdrawn by Linux (it was only ever partial support tbh as it runs under Wine) I've been on the lookout for new photo management software.

I've tried Shotwell, that seems to do a reasonable job but not comprehensive. It would be ok if I hadn't been pointed towards DigiKam by a blog entry somewere comparing packages.

Both shotwell and digikam can be installed direct from the Fedora repositories using yum.

DigiKam seems to have a much greater range for features. Shotwell worked well enough, what it does it does well. I'm going to try DigiKam for a while now and see how I get on.

One quirk of DigiKam in Fedora 17 is that out of the box there didn't seem to be anyway to export images to another folder ready for burning to disc or uploading to a website.

A bit of reading later and an installation of "kipi-plugins" later I seem to have a plethora of export options.
I now have options to upload images directly to a variety of website (Flickr, Facebook, ImgShack, PicassaWeb, SmugMug the list goes on and on!) as well as local export (eg as HTML presentation, email client, IM client ....) but still not yet found a simple "take these photos and export to this place on disc" option!

It does seem odd to me that such fundamental functionality isn't included in DigiKam straight from the repositories. Even if that was just a matter of saying kipi-plugins is a dependency of DigiKam.


EDIT:
Found it!
Apparently to export files to a local directory I have to go through "export -> Export to remote computer". Hardly intuitive but it works!

Fedora 17, Eclipse and Javascript

I forget why or how I ended up in the situation but I recently ended up switching from a downloaded Eclipse installation to using the Fedora repository version of Eclipse.

So I'm now flying Juno Eclipse. Installed bunch of packages to let me do Java and PHP work in Eclipse:

[root@bigfoot html]# rpm -qa | grep eclipse

eclipse-pde-4.2.0-0.22.I201205031800.fc17.x86_64

eclipse-rcp-4.2.0-0.22.I201205031800.fc17.x86_64

eclipse-phpeclipse-1.2.3-4.fc17.noarch

eclipse-emf-xsd-2.8.0-0.7.e674bb28ad412fc9bc786f2f9b3c157eb2cbdae0.fc17.noarch

eclipse-swt-4.2.0-0.22.I201205031800.fc17.x86_64

eclipse-dtp-1.10-0.1.M6.fc17.noarch

eclipse-gef-3.8.0-0.3.20120402.fc17.noarch

eclipse-platform-4.2.0-0.22.I201205031800.fc17.x86_64

eclipse-emf-core-2.8.0-0.22.I201205031800.fc17.x86_64

eclipse-emf-2.8.0-0.7.e674bb28ad412fc9bc786f2f9b3c157eb2cbdae0.fc17.noarch

icu4j-eclipse-4.4.2.2-11.fc17.noarch

eclipse-jdt-4.2.0-0.22.I201205031800.fc17.x86_64

[root@bigfoot html]# 

So great, I have a shiny Juno installation that lets me do PHP work (not tested Java builds yet...) , woohoo!

So how do I get Javascript editing working?
When I was using Eclipse downloaded directly from the Eclipse project I just needed to install WTP (I think), so I went looking for that and found a few likely candidates:

yum install eclipse-wtp-common eclipse-wtp-servertools eclipse-wtp-sourceediting

Now when I fire up Eclipse Juno, it starts, but I get all sorts of error messages about null pointers and not being able to initialise plugin properly. I guess those packages aren't quite right somehow.

So when I get this PHP contract out of the way I may be switching back to a 'proper' Eclipse installation direct from the Eclipse project.

Unless any Fedora people out there can hold my hand through my Eclipse Juno Javascript editing setup needs? ;)

More Gnome3 / Fedora 17 woe

I used use a handy feature of Gnome 3 (there is something about it I like!) which let me use the power key (aka windows key) to perform a quick search for the file by it's name.

So when I knew the filename pressing that key and typing the filename would open it quickly instead of ploughing through directories in my file explorer. It seems either the Fedora17 upgrade or the Gnome 3.4 upgrade that came with it, has disabled this feature.

Any ideas Linux people?

Fedora 17 upgrade - not the best experience

I have been running Fedora Linux for a reason. It tends to get new + shiny stuff before other distros. New & Shiny = good.

Of course to offset the goodness of new and shiny you will occasionally get issues. The upgrade from FC16 to FC17 seems to create its fair share of issues!

After running the preupgrade process and rebooting:

• Only FC16 kernels listed in grub menu
• Some aspects of system have clearly changed, uname - r returns an FC16 kernel

Oh dear. This is going to be 'fun'!

Following some handy info from a post in FedoraForum.org I  rebooted and edited the grub config at boot time (press e when grub meu is shown - you left that couple of second delay in your grub config right? ;) ). Changed all references from FC16 to FC17 and I now appear to have booted a FC17 kernel.

Now if I query rpm to see what state I'm in regarding packages:

[root@bigfoot /]# rpm -qa | grep fc16

plexus-maven-plugin-1.3.8-5.fc16.noarch

compiz-gnome-0.9.5.92.1-0.2.gite676f1b12eb8db3a76978eed5bfc7c2cf9a0b6ce.fc16.x86_64

alacarte-0.13.2-3.fc16.noarch

yum-3.4.3-24.fc16.noarch

felix-parent-1.2.1-6.fc16.noarch

netbeans-ide-6.9-5.fc16.noarch

plexus-sec-dispatcher-1.4-4.fc16.noarch

compiz-plugins-main-0.9.5.92-1.fc16.x86_64

mdadm-3.2.3-7.fc16.x86_64

compiz-gtk-0.9.5.92.1-0.2.gite676f1b12eb8db3a76978eed5bfc7c2cf9a0b6ce.fc16.x86_64

async-http-client-1.6.1-1.fc16.noarch

pmd-4.2.5-11.fc16.noarch

libcompizconfig-0.9.5.92-1.fc16.x86_64

cscope-15.7a-9.fc16.x86_64

libva-freeworld-1.0.14-1.fc16.x86_64

netbeans-cvsclient-6.9-5.fc16.noarch

plexus-xmlrpc-1.0-0.7.b4.3.fc16.noarch

telepathy-butterfly-0.5.15-4.fc16.noarch

compiz-0.9.5.92.1-0.2.gite676f1b12eb8db3a76978eed5bfc7c2cf9a0b6ce.fc16.x86_64

libgdiplus-2.10-2.fc16.x86_64

Some of those I'm quite happy to remove (eg NetBeans packages), some I'm not so sure on (Compiz - maybe needed by my Gnome installation) and others I am quite concerned about - anyone fancy running 'yum remove yum'? No, me either.

So it's off to the inspect theyum conf files and make sure nothing points at a FC16 repo before updating and trying to clean up these errant packages.

Looking at the man page for yum it seems there is a handy synchronization command that I'm hoping will sort some of these package issues out, and indeed it did. It seems I had more than just FC16 packages that hadn't been updated, yum found a FC13 and even a FC12 package!

I'll have to use this syncho command more often.


[root@bigfoot yum.repos.d]# yum distribution-synchronization
Loaded plugins: presto, refresh-packagekit
Resolving Dependencies
--> Running transaction check
---> Package cscope.x86_64 0:15.7a-8.fc17 will be a downgrade
---> Package cscope.x86_64 0:15.7a-9.fc16 will be erased
---> Package mdadm.x86_64 0:3.2.3-6.fc17 will be a downgrade
---> Package mdadm.x86_64 0:3.2.3-7.fc16 will be erased
---> Package ndesk-dbus.x86_64 0:0.6.1a-10.fc17 will be a downgrade
---> Package ndesk-dbus.x86_64 0:0.6.1b-1.fc13 will be erased
---> Package vbetool.x86_64 0:1.2.1-2.fc17 will be a downgrade
---> Package vbetool.x86_64 0:1.2.2-1.fc12 will be erased
---> Package yum.noarch 0:3.4.3-23.fc17 will be a downgrade
---> Package yum.noarch 0:3.4.3-24.fc16 will be erased
--> Finished Dependency Resolution

Dependencies Resolved

Banshee 2 way sync

Anyone out there able to help get 2 way sync working properly in Banshee 2.0.1 on Fedora 15?

Here is my situation, 2 PCs and a USB thumbdrive. I want to be able to use the thumbdrive to sync the 2 PCs, the thumbdrive also gets used in the car.

So if I buy some music via the Banshee Amazon plugin on one machine, sync to the thumbdrive I then want that file to automatically find its way into the library on machine two during a sync. Likewise if I tweak some meta data or set a rating on a track on one machine I want those changes to be reflected on the other machine after syncing.

If my thumbdrive contains a subset of my collection (eg a playlist) I don't want the sync to assume that means that all those that aren't on the thumbdrive should be deleted from the PC as happened today (thankfully I do semi regular backups!)!

Perhaps the answer is to maintain a playlist on each machine for the thumbdrive and sync the drive/playlist together rather than the library, would that import new tracks and data into main library while not deleting 'missing' tracks from the PC?