It’s finally time to try out things with Ruby 1.9 – people start complaining that my libs don’t run with 1.9. Sorry for that. I’m still sticking to “Never touch a running system!”, so why should I use Ruby 1.9 when 1.8 works great?

RVM

First I discovered rvm which is a great tool for hosting different Ruby versions in your shell and switching environments on the fly.

That’s

> sudo gem install rvm

Now go and install Ruby 1.9.1 (couldn’t get 1.9.2 working)

> rvm install 1.9.1

This will install Ruby 1.9.1 in your home directory, which is awesomely cool.

Switching to the new ruby/gems is nothing more than

> rvm use 1.9.1

Running Rails

Things start getting shitty now. When trying to run Rails with ruby 1.9 I got something

no such file to load -- openssl

rvm explains to install the package openssl. That doesn’t work for me

$ rvm package install openssl
Package 'openssl' is unknown.
Usage: 'rvm package {install,uninstall} {openssl,zlib,readline,iconv,ncurses}'

which is… strange.

Note: Wayne fixed that in the rvm release 0.1.24 – so the rest of this article is useless. Thanks, cowboy!

Following the great directions here didn’t help either, although it’s a good post.

At some point make failed with

error: ruby/io.h: No such file or directory

The solution

I finally ended up fixing it with

$ sudo apt-get install libopenssl-ruby1.9.1
$ cp /usr/lib/ruby/1.9.1/i486-linux/openssl.so ~/.rvm/rubies/ruby-1.9.1-p378/lib/ruby/1.9.1/i686-linux/
$ cp -R /usr/lib/ruby/1.9.1/openssl* ~/.rvm/rubies/ruby-1.9.1-p378/lib/ruby/1.9.1/

and the shit’s working.

Installing gems

rvm provides some decent way to install gems, it works like

$ rvm 1.9.2 gem install cells --no-ri --no-rdoc

When running ruby 1.8.7 be sure to install sqlite3-ruby, not sqlite3. The latter version is only for 1.9 and will throw arbitrary

NameError: uninitialized constant Encoding

Hope that helps!

When a friend tried to upload some files via Skype to my PC it kept failing, Skype 2.1.0.47 for Ubuntu complained “can’t write to file” as soon as I accepted the upload.

Here’s the solution:

First, I created a world-writable directory

mkdir /home/nick/skype-uploads
chmod 777 /home/nick/skype-uploads

I opened the File Transfer dialog, clicked the sprocked icon and selected Change Default Download Directory.... After setting that directory to my fresh skype-uploads dir uploads worked!

After copying a presentation from my laptop to my desktop box (which’s running OpenOffice.org 3.1.1) the embedded AVI videos didn’t show up anymore. The error message: “The format of the selected file is not supported.” It turned out that the JRE was missing gstreamer.

The solution

sudo apt-get install ubuntu-restricted-extras

Colleagues keep laughing at me.
It seems that I missed the point in a programmer’s life where he faces a shimmering light at the end of the dark terminal tunnel, where he suddently gets enlightened… and switches to eclipse or Textmate.

Being an IDE-reject I’m used to work with bare-bones text editors, which support syntax-coloring, a bright background and a few well-established keyboard shortcuts like Cmd+c Cmd+v.

That’s all I need.

Ever since I can remember I disliked IDEs and how they suppressed my way of organizing files, tools and minds. And they are slow.

The last 4 years I worked with nedit and my own small file-browser kebap. Two weeks ago me and my colleague Felix discovered scribes, a text-editor for Linux written in Python. Dozens of text-editor came and went away in my life, but for some reasons I really like scribes. Some of its key features I already love are

• streamlined workflows with a simple and clean UI
• jump to files with the F9 file-dialog by typing their name
• code templates which can be triggered while typing
• character pair completion -yeah i hate to close a bracket and move back the cursor by hand
• word completion while typing remembers phrases you typed, like long function names and cryptic variables
• sufficient syntax-coloring for Ruby and PHP (well that could be better)

I really was distracted by the tab-less UI first. “What a mess!” came to my mind. A couple of days later I was conviced that the arrogant attitude of scribes is… cool.
It’s useless to organize your docs in tabs, the more docs you open, the sooner you forget which tabpanel holds the code file you’re looking for. So why not let the F9 file browser keep track of all those files?

Today I noticed that I had 46 opened scribes documents – each in a separate window – while programming at work. Since I simply hit F9 and type in a few characters to jump to the file I completely forgot the “need” for MDIs, tabs, project managers and other “tools”.

Enough praising, let’s hit the keyboard.

Installing scribes 0.4-dev on Ubuntu Jaunty

The 0.3 version shipped with Ubuntu has some bugs, so I recommend the 0.4 version which is almost stable.

sudo apt-get install bzr libglib2.0-dev gnome-common
bzr branch lp:scribes
cd scribes/
./autogen.sh
make
sudo make install

When starting scribes in a terminal, you might get a python exception bitching about
ImportError: No module named gtksourceview2

Well, just do

sudo apt-get install python-gtksourceview2 python-gnome2-desktop-dev python-gnome2-extras-dev

and have fun experiencing a smart, but not too smart editor. Thanks, mystilleef!

After more than a year of marriage my X31 laptop and gutsy had to break up again. I had to upgrade my linux distribution due to some very old, outdated packages. As usual: problems after upgrading. Did I notice that I really hate to upgrade things?
Well, here are some directions which should ease your jump to intrepid.

My current kernel: 2.6.27-11-generic.

Hibernate and suspend

One reason I sticked to gutsy was a working hibernate/suspend setup. With intrepid

• booting for resume crashed after suspend (black screen)
• hibernation crashed and left a blinking caps lock LED

Well I found out this was my PCMCIA WiFi card- a D-Link DWL-G630. If unplugged, suspend and hibernate seemed to work. All you need to do to fix it is configuring gnome-power-manager correctly (which is the default Ubuntu hibernation subsystem). It needs to unload the kernel module for the WiFi card.

Create the file /etc/pm/config.d/modules if it does not exist already and fill in the line

SUSPEND_MODULES="rt61pci"

Wireless and WPA2 encryption

Ok, so don’t waste your time trying to log into a WPA2 encrypted wireless network with the built-in Cisco Aironet Wireless 802.11b. The airo driver in the current kernel only supports WEP. That sucks. Go and get that D-Link card, it works great.
Anyway, the Aironet still is enabled and sometimes confuses network-manager.

Besides, it is completely nonsense to have two active antennas next to your balls, so switch off the built-in.

The Fn+F5 key doesn’t turn off the beast. We have to use the force again. Instruct modprobe to no longer load the kernel module by editing /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist and add the line

blacklist airo

Flash for Firefox

Even the Flash installation is nothing more than

sudo apt-get install flashplugin-nonfree

Don’t forget to restart your browser- now you can watch p… eeeer play free flash games again.

Ruby on Rails

Install the ruby interpreter and necessary tools with

sudo apt-get install ruby1.8 ruby1.8-dev memcached 
  libopenssl-ruby1.8 libmysqlclient15-dev

but do not install gem using apt-get since it will mess up things. Browse to http://rubyforge.org/frs/?group_id=126 and get the newest rubygems package, unpack it and install it with

cd rubygems-1.3.1
sudo setup.rb
sudo mv /usr/bin/gem1.8 /usr/bin/gem

Then install necessary gems

sudo gem install rake rdoc memcache-client system_timer 
  rails mysql

Ok, Ubuntu rocks again

Retrospectively I have to admit this was the easiest upgrade ever. I could manage the hibernate issue quite quickly (with some help of my buddy Felix). Everything else worked out-of-the-box. Big props and thanks to the (X)ubuntu team!