Things on my mind. George Drapeau's Weblog

Sun's ISV Engineering group has been working hard all spring and summer to get fistfuls of popular and important open source applications into the OpenSolaris "contrib" repository, a repo for third-party applications that can be assumed to have some level of sanity checking done on them.

Eric Reid in ISV Engineering has submitted three different releases of Drupal; today, the final release (Acquia Drupal) was approved and placed into /contrib.  These three applications are

1. Drupal 5 (release 5.20)
   
2. Drupal 6 (release 6.14)
   
3. Acquia Drupal, created by the commercial enterprise backing Drupal: Acquia.com
   

It's nice and easy to try out any of these Drupal packages in OpenSolaris.  Want help?  Read this entry on drupal.org for complete yet succinct instructions.

(update)
I should also point out that when you install Drupal in OpenSolaris, the package management system will pull in the Sun WebStack components automatically, which is all free as you would expect.  It's the AMP stack components you know and love, but optimized by Sun for out-of-the-box performance improvement, plus a management console that lets you see what's going on with the components while you're running your Drupal web site.

(Okay, that may have sounded a bit like an advertisement, but we really did put a lot of engineering effort into optimizing the AMP components on Sun's systems and the new analytics thingy is pretty cool looking.)
(/update)

Meanwhile, this adds one of the premier open source content management systems to the stable of apps freely and easily available to you when you install OpenSolaris on your computer.  You can even choose from amongst the leaders in blog engines / content management systems / web site building tools: Drupal, Joomla!, WordPress are all available now.  Here is a list of packages published to the contrib repository.

Check 'em out!

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I listen to a lot of podcasts, usually when during my runs or while I'm driving.  One of the podcasts I've been listening to over the past few years is This Week in Tech (TWiT), hosted by Leo Laporte.

Well, he's got a network of podcasts on the TWiT Network and I recently found a new one that I think is pretty good: FLOSS (Free Libre Open Source Software).  It's a weekly show in an interview format; each episode is about a different open source topic or person.

Recently, FLOSS interviewed Sun's own Glynn Foster to discuss OpenSolaris.  Not a bad introduction to OpenSolaris if you haven't checked it out yet.

Another Sun-related FLOSS Weekly is the ZFS podcast.

I also enjoyed the interview with Jono Bacon of Canonical; it looks like there are plenty of other FLOSS episodes worth a listen.

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Here's something I don't understand: I'm trying to compile the open source program "ffmpeg", useful for transcoding from one kind of movie file and video encoding format to another, plus a whole big bag-o-tricks.

So I download the source code:

svn checkout svn://svn.ffmpeg.org/ffmpeg/trunk ffmpeg

Then I go into the ffmpeg source directory and type "./configure".  It fails, reporting:

check_ld
check_cc
BEGIN /tmp/ffconf.XXRJaOkG.c
    1   #include <signal.h>
    2   static void sighandler(int sig){
    3       raise(SIGTERM);
    4   }
    5   int main(void){
    6       signal(SIGILL, sighandler);
    7       signal(SIGFPE, sighandler);
    8       signal(SIGSEGV, sighandler);
    9   #ifdef SIGBUS
   10       signal(SIGBUS, sighandler);
   11   #endif
   12       {     volatile int i=0;
   13       __asm__ volatile (
   14           "xorl %%ebp, %%ebp"
   15       ::: "%ebp");
   16       return i; }
   17   }
END /tmp/ffconf.XXRJaOkG.c
gcc -D_ISOC99_SOURCE -D_POSIX_C_SOURCE=200112 -std=c99
-D_FILE_OFFSET_BITS=64 -D_LARGEFILE_SOURCE -D__EXTENSIONS__
-fomit-frame-pointer -c -o /tmp/ffconf.XXYJaalG.o
/tmp/ffconf.XXRJaOkG.c
gcc -o /tmp/ffconf.XXTJaWkG /tmp/ffconf.XXYJaalG.o
./configure: line 663: 16530: Terminated

I can't tell why it fails even making a Makefile, but after scanning the web for a while, I find a suggestion that says "use bash as your shell instead of whatever shell you were using."  I had been using tcsh, then tried ksh, then tried sh, all with the same error result.

So then I try "bash configure".  What do you know?  It created a Makefile just fine.

Now why is that?  Can somebody help me out here?  Because I don't know why the choice of a shell would make the configure script succeed or fail.  And that seems bad for the other shells available on OpenSolaris.

The app seems to compile, mostly.  Next: see how much of the app got compiled and how much of it runs.

Why am I doing this?  Because it's part of "pyTiVo", which I'd like to get running on my OpenSolaris home media server, so that I can back up the TiVo's content onto this nice, ZFS-enabled server.  I'll update my progress here.

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As I'm learning how to use Drupal for creating and deploying web sites, I'm keeping track of it in blog entries.

The way I work: I do my development on a virtualized environment: I run OpenSolaris as a guest OS under VirtualBox; that way, I can easily blow away my development/test environment or send it to other machines running VirtualBox.  Then, I install the WebStack (PHP, Apache web server, MySQL), then I install Drupal using the instructions on the drupal.org web site.

Once I get my test Drupal site working, I follow these instructions to deploy to an actual production server.  It makes the develop-test-deploy cycle pretty easy, and I can develop and test pretty much anywhere.

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