RockyCode

IntelliJ IDEA is a great development environment. I enjoy it very much. It complements the OS of pleasure, Linux. I mostly the Ubuntu distro or a derivative. Here's a easy way to get yourself an IntelliJ launcher so you don't have to run the bin/idea.sh file if you don't want to.

This post describes a quick and dirty way to configure apt-add-repository to use port 80 instead of port 11371.

If you, like me, are sick of having to restart the XServer when you undock/dock your laptop in order to get the display to reconfigure (ok, so I've only undocked once since I installed Linux; still, I was bugged), your days of wo are numbered.

Nginx and PHP make a high performance combination on Ubuntu; here's how to get the system up and running.

Occasionally, you'll need to install software that's only currently available as an .rpm package, meaning it is specifically packaged for a Red Hat Linux distro. These can be used to create a debian package, however, that can then be installed easily under Ubuntu. The program "alien" is used to do this

My one bone of contention in using Linux has been the paucity of Exchange-compatible clients. I have the inclination to blame M$, but hey--my Android phone client works just fine. Evolution, Thunderbird, KMail--sure, I can get IMAP mail, but none have worked to the point of syncing with my appointments. Enter DavMail. I'll show you how to install it and set it up to work with your company's Exchange server.

So many ways to make ISOs, using ubuntu, but where is mkisofs when you need it?

New version of virtual box. Problem was, I needed to uninstall the old version first.

Synergy is a fantastic project that allows you to share a single set of input devices (keyboard and mouse) over multiple machines. Clipboard sharing is also supported. It's remarkably easy to set up, and it works across multiple platforms.

When you setup your computer at the time of your initial Ubuntu installation, you assign your computer a hostname. In my case, I gave it a hostname and then later wanted to change it to something else. This is accomplished in two easy steps.

In Ubuntu 9.10, they removed Java 5 from the update repositories for Karmic because Java 5 was end of lifed in Oct. 09. This has made it more cumbersome for the Java 5 user on Karmic. Luckily, cumbersome is still pretty easy.

Sometimes you need to install a security certificate for authentication to work for certain services -- services that are accessed by your java application that requirement a secure connection. For instance, needing to authenticate against an LDAP server from one of our apps, we had to run a little InstallCert.java on all JDKs used to run the app.

On a Sun keyboard, the ctrl key is actually in the space that the caps lock key occupies on a standard qwerty keyboard nowadays. In a program where the ctrl key is often used, this positioning can be helpful as no Vulcan figure stretches are required for common key patterns. So, why not change caps lock to be a control key.

Mark Logic Server seems to be the latest, greatest in content serve-up. At least it is generating a lot of excitement at the LDS Church, where it's being used for new content-centric apps/sites. Being caught in the wave of awesome, I was interested in getting it running in my favorite dev environment: Ubunutu-flavored Linux.

It wasn't bad at all. In fact, it was accomplished in almost as few steps as installing Apache or Tomcat. Except, after this installation, full XML xquery'age is now possible! Here are the steps, slightly elongated by the fact that all Mark ...

It's important to understand what libraries, utilities, engines and so on that are used by your Ubuntu Linux OS. It's easy to tell if you only have on option -- of course, it uses the only thing available. But if there are multiple options, which does it use? In general, the default; Here's how to set it.

This is similar to the Set Default Applications dialog in Windows XP.

It is one of the nicest things to be able to work remotely. Almost all my jobs have allowed this. My current job allows it on a limited basis as well. It's even more attractive an option now that I have a nice desk chair at home, for which I currently long, because I'm currently typing up this post from a 2nd grader mini-chair while I wait for my lovely wife, April.

Remote working goodness is just a few shell commands away via Cisco VPN in Linux!

As awesome as Linux is, I still have moments where I want something from the Windows world. Shy of putting a whole dual-booted partition on my harddrive, I am doing the virtual machine gig. I have tried VMWare before, but have just found the whole experience rather clunky. I even found VirtualPC (running on Windows) more pleasing. Another big kicker with VM's is performace -- I can't ever seem to get even comparable performance from a VM. Several of my coworkers report, however, that they are please with the performance of Sun's VirtualBox. I, therefore, am giving it ...

I love the volume control scheme for Vista that allows one to adjust the volume on a per-application basis. It turns out that this functionality is also available for Linux!

I was having a really hard time getting DVD to play on Hardy Heron, but finally got it. After a daily ritual of attempts, finally, Ted and I struck gold!

All over the net, there are questions asked about running Crystal Reports in Linux. This isn't a solution for running Crystal in Linux per se, but running Crystal as lightweight as possible on a Linux host machine. This means, run a VM, install Crystal, and use a small Oracle client.