photo by zruvalcaba

After my last post, I thought I would share what I use for developing on Ubuntu.

Editor

I have always been a hands-on kinda guy, so I don’t use any of the fancy IDEs. Right now, I am using SciTE for two reasons. It feels lightweight and it is available for Linux and Windows. Since my laptop does not have a lot of memory, a lightweight editor is a must. I tried Eclipse, but it chewed up all my memory and slowed things to a crawl. So SciTE with some additional plugins (and information on getting them going) powers the development at McKinney Station.

Ruby and Rails

I am using the latest Ruby and Rails for all new development. For testing I am using RSpec, which seems a lot more intuitive to me. Other gems I have installed include:

• FasterCSV – parsing CSV files
• starfish – simple Ruby Map/Reduce
• mongrel – lightweight Ruby web server
• hpricot – Ruby HTML parser

Database

I love starting all of my development projects with SQLite. It is so easy to get up and running. As the project matures, I am able to quickly switch development over to a MySQL database with a change in the application’s database configuration and a quick rake db:migrate.

Version Control

All source code versioning is done with Subversion. With this quick little script, I can get a Rails project committed and started in minutes.

Conclusion

I am always looking for ways to speed up my development process, but so far this is working for me. And it is very enjoyable.

photo by ralph lehmann

Last week, my laptop started acting funny. Not that unusual since I run Ubuntu on my laptop. It’s not one of the super computers all my buddies have, but it does let me get the job done.

So last week when things finally got to a tipping point, I decided to try an upgrade to the latest Ubuntu release. Needless to say, it didn’t go as planned. With a planned trip coming up, I needed to get things back in order quickly. I made sure I had a current backup of my /home directory, and did a brand new install. Things went mostly well (remember this is a laptop) and within a day I was back up and going.

For my own reference later, these are the things I had to do to get Ubuntu working on my Averatec.

• Add boot setting to enable wired network.
• Download Broadcom 43xx drivers for wireless network.
• Use ndiswrapper and blacklist broadcom drivers (see last post by codyjack)
• Unlock the keyring automatically when logging in to quickly connect to wireless networks.
• Restore backup
• Get back to work