The Seapine View

As a Linux user I am often asked or confronted about my distribution of choice. More often than not I respond with a statement that mimics the following: well, it depends on what I need out of the distro. Quickly, I’m met with; did you see this new distro that just came out? Did you see its package management tool? Did you see this… did you see that… etc.

For me, more often than not, the package management tool is the deciding factor in choosing a new Linux distribution. But what if someone has an old box; a development box, a web server box, a firewall, a box to run some services or compile some code or whatever. This machine runs a Linux distro which is so old, that you find yourself deciding on whether to wipe the hard drive and install a new distro or perform a manual update/upgrade. Many older Linux distributions don’t have an easy way to execute an update/upgrade. So what does one do?

Well, I am one of those people. I have an old machine running Slackware 8 and I recently ran into such a situation. Yes, I know the distribution is old and I should probably move to a newer version, but as long as updated packages/patches exist for it, I’m in a comfort zone, thanks to SWaret.

SWaret has saved me a ton of time, primarily because I did not wipe my box and go back to configuring the new installed OS to the way it was. SWaret takes care of all the little things I do not want to do manually to keep my machine updated and secure. For some slack users, this could take an extended amount of time, especially when packages have multiple dependencies.

So, SWaret, well, it takes care of dependencies, updates, upgrades, removal of packages and more, plus it’s easy to use and beats Slackware’s out of the box pkgtool. No it doesn’t have a web interface yet (although I think it’s in the works). However, it does have a GUI front end to it. The GUI front end does not come with the package, but it’s a separate project called QtSwaret aimed at Slackware and Slackware based distros. SWaret is not restricted for use on older Slackware distributions; it also works very well on new Slackware distros.

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Trolltech, a company based in Oslo Norway with additional locations in the United States, China and Germany, never stops innovating. To some it is known as the backbone of the GUI in Linux. To others, it is just a convenient way to provide a cross-platform solution. A powerful and easy to use Window Manager, often called a Desktop Environment, KDE, which ships with most current Linux distributions, is written using Trolltech’s Qt framework. KDE also has plenty of other Qt based applications that are a part of the package. The GUI elements and windows are friendly to the eye and provide high levels of customization.

For those who are not familiar with Qt (or cute as the Trolltech engineers refer to it), it is a rich framework that allows for cross-platform development using an extensive C++ based API. Underneath Qt is written in native, platform specific code to allow for such prosperous functionality. Callbacks are a term of the past with Qt’s original signal/slot mechanism.

Up until now, Qt was the popular beast in Trolltech’s long line of products, which also includes QTopia. However, last month Trolltech released Qt Jambi Development Preview. Qt Jambi is a Qt based framework, which allows a developer to use Qt’s power in Java applications. Developers will now be able to use the Qt API in their Java applications and will seamlessly integrate C++ and Java languages in other projects.

There are of course a number of issues that Trolltech had to deal with when working on this product. How do you handle Qt value types vs object types? How do you handle references, or pointers to references? What about memory management? Since Java doesn’t have multiple inheritance, how does Qt Jambi handle that? And what about protected members of a class? Qt Jambi takes care of all these issues and Trolltech has done a fantastic job in employing proper mappings. All the details are described in the Qt Jambi white paper.

This product, as it evolves, should provide a great level of convenience for a developer such as myself. If you’ve never heard of Qt, or never wanted to use C++ with Java via JNI because of its abstract nature, I’d strongly recommend checking out this developer preview.

Attending WWDC 2006 in San Francisco California was electrifying. It took place at the Moscone center, located in downtown San Fran. The crowd was young, energetic and eager to be enlightened.

The first day started off with the keynote speech led by Steve Jobs, followed by a series of sessions, or a curriculum as I like to refer to it. Mac OS X Leopard was announced along with a number of other features which take the OS to the next level. In addition, a new powerful machine was announced, the Mac Pro!

Keynote speech from August 7th, 2006

During the week long conference we got a chance to check out the Apple campus located in Cupertino.