Copia

Just saw an announcement for:

The Linux Enterprise Cluster by Karl Kopper

Nothing demonstrates our dependence on technology more than when a server goes down and office productivity comes to a screeching halt. Author Karl Kopper's real-world response to this scenario is outlined in "The Linux Enterprise Cluster" (No Starch Press, April '05). The book describes how he put several inexpensive computers on a network, installed free software and made the individual machines operate as one big server called a cluster, thus saving his company time, money and resources. "The Linux Enterprise Cluster" goes through every step needed from start to finish to build a cluster of Linux computers capable of supporting an entire enterprise reliably and cost-effectively.

Sounds very interesting, especially the focus on using software and hardware within the reach of most organizations.

[Uche Ogbuji]

ReleaseForge

We just put out a 4Suite release and one of my tasks was to update SourceForge. If you've ever maintained a project on SF, you'll know that making a release through the Web forms is a very tedious experience. ReleaseForge is a Python/QT GUI that makes the process easier. Much easier. Normally SF release for 4Suite takes me a half hour or so. With ReleaseForge it was a matter of five minutes.

In installed the ReleaseForge RPM, but it didn't seem to have useful dependency info (a common problem with Python RPMs). I'm on Fedora Core 3, and got it working fine by doing:

apt-get install PyQt sip

After launching ReleaseForge and giving it your SF login info, you start with some basic info for the release.

Then you select all the files to release and use simple controls to set the file types. This is the part that used to really get my goat. Now it's a snap.

At this point ReleaseForge takes over and does all the talking with SF.

ReleaseForge offers an option to post project news as well.

But this seems to use different rules from the SourceForge Web forms. When I posted simple text with line breaks, ReleaseForge humped it all onto one line, as you can see. Posting the same text into the SF Web form had the expected result. But posting news on SF was already easy, so no real complaints about this little quirk.

[Uche Ogbuji]