BEDROOMNET: Subversion & Samba

As I mentioned on a previous post, one of the projects I have on the go is an RTL Visualiser. As I want this to be cross-platform, I suppose I had better test it on a few platforms. To this end, I set up a small local network where my mintLinux desktop could talk to my XP laptop. The idea was to host a Subversion repository on the desktop, where I'd be doing most of the development, and use a mix of Samba, Subversion and TortoiseSVN to get the XP laptop to access the repo.

Samba

Out of the box (and with a crossover cable) the desktop could read shared folders on the laptop, but the laptop couldn't see the desktop. So after installing Samba, running the Network Setup Wizard on the laptop and sharing a few folders on both machines, things were running well. I think I disabled the password stuff on Samba because I still haven't figured out how to add accounts - I don't need them anyway for this network. I'll poke about on it a bit more once I fork out for an internet connection.

Subversion

Getting this running was fairly easy too. First I installed Subversion on the desktop and set up a repository on an ext3 partition. Then I installed TortoiseSVN on the laptop - a SVN client program which hooks into Windows explorer and gives extra SVN command options when you right-click on a folder or file. After this, I easily checked out the SVN repo on the laptop and ran my RTL Visualiser (Version 0.1!) successfully on the laptop!

I couldn't check any changes in though. But after adding a user and a password to the repo's passwd file and enabling password authentication, I was soon checking stuff into the desktop repo from the laptop.

At the end of the day...

All in all I'm fairly happy with this setup, and it wasn't too difficult to set up after doing a bit of digging around in the Subversion docs.

LinuxMint

Distros and Me

As mentioned in my last post, I had a rotten time trying to find a linux distro that suited me straight out of the box. I suppose this is a big ask, but the reasoning behind it is that I know I'm going to want to try out tons of distros, but I don't want to have to go thru the hassle of configuring it to suite each time. I suppose I'm going to have to settle on one distro for "everyday use" and leave the other ext3 partition on my harddrive for my new distro fixes. I've settled on LinuxMint (MintLinux??) 'cos I like the codec support and the themes and I like the fact that it can use the Ubuntu repos.

NVIDIA Drivers

I hate freedom, and I want my NVIDIA drivers. My Linux box remains unconnected to the net, which makes it a pain to install the NVIDIA drivers on LinuxMint. Luckily, I stumbled across an easy fix for installing NVIDIA drivers. It requires a Ubuntu Fiesty CD (which matches LinuxMint Cassandra), which I got with a linux magazine...

* Fire up Synaptic and disable all the repositories pointing to the web.
* Select 'Add a CDROM' and insert the Ubuntu CD when prompted.
* Close Synaptic.
* Open Restricted Driver Manager.
* Enable NVIDIA Drivers, which now it grabs from the CD drive.
* (Reboot? - I can't remember exactly)

OpenOffice

I've spotted a few funnies with the locale settings when using OpenOffice. I selected Dublin, Ireland as my timezone (locale?) when installing LinuxMint. I'm also assuming that the language packs that are installed depend on the locale in some logical way. But unfortunately I had to manually install the help files and the dictionaries for OpenOffice. It looks like the installer was looking for 'English (Ireland)' for example and could not find it, but it did not revert to 'English (UK)' or 'English (US)' and instead installed nothing. I suppose what I'm getting at is that it'd be nice if there was some kind of graceful fallback for OpenOffice Help and Dictionary files.