• @tobrien Agreed. The Debian testing package is a bit more up to date. What I do though is http://tinyurl.com/lqp32g #maven #ubuntu #nexus in reply to tobrien #
• Downloaded Google Listen http://listen.googlelabs.com/index.html .. now off to go canoeing #
• Wow. John Willis from itmanagement is going to work on ubuntu one cloud. Look forward to the results. #
• @kellyrob99 Promise to look at joda-time tomorrow.. http://joda-time.sourceforge.net/ #
• Enjoying the Victoria dragon boat races… #

• Listening to @omegataupodcast about bird migration with professor hans winkler. Went for a bird watching session with him as a kid long ago. #
• @dillyh .. I guess then it is not a power point presentation but just a presentation… #
• Laughing at a quote from @seradio 142 "We build software architectures like cathedrals. First we build it, then we pray." #
• Hurting after leaving a bunch of skin on my sk8 deck. Better get back to podcast listening and renovating. #
• Watching lots of maven related artifact updates getting into debian testing. Awesome work! #
• @jonobacon .. yeah.. they are all pretty damn good looking, also bigger displays and more. Shipping outside the states however.. #
• Even though I don't like to admit it MS Live Meeting works okay on Ubuntu Linux. Maybe because it is Java powered.. hahaha ;-) #
• @motodev thanks for the linux version of the tools. Downloading now ;-) in reply to motodev #
• Bored out of my mind by Right Management career transition workshop. Coding in parallel. #
• @Brian_Fox This service is unavailable on your device on all browser for me on Ubuntu. #fail xenocode in reply to Brian_Fox #
• Facebook chat has connection problems .. #fail #
• @abstratt look at the build helper plugin… in reply to abstratt #
• Listening to agile executive podcast 5. Pretty good so far. Also found theheretech podcast. As usual there is lots to learn… #
• No google voice for me in Canada. What a shame. Oh well.. downloading Maven 2.2.1 instead.. #
• Off to shower after a day of home renovation and podcast listening (illegalargurment, linuxoutlaws, itmanagement, riaweekly, …) #
• Just got my google voice invite. Sweet. #
• VMWare buying Springsource and therefore getting Groovy. So will the installer for Groovy start to suck and Grails only work with Windows? #
• Got my blog post "Installing Apache Maven – Luxury Edition" out there ;-) http://tinyurl.com/lqp32g #
• Installing #nexus on my dev machine for local proxying and more. Could not use #maven without it. #
• Brushing up my resume. Should be ready to be spread around shortly. #

For starters I am using Ubuntu Linux and I could just install Maven from the repository like this

sudo aptitude install maven2

and be done with it. I actually do that as a first step. However this does not play nice with having the latest and greatest version of Maven and getting the benefit of the numerous new features and bug fixes from new releases. I could use the Debian Testing repository and use apt pinning to stick with the version there, but things get hairy quickly that way. I also found I don’t have enough patience to wait for the package when a new release comes out, so I get the latest release from the
Apache site and stick it into /opt/apache-maven-2.2.0, add a symlink /opt/maven sudo ln -s /home/java/software/apache-maven-2.2.0/ maven and add M2_HOME and a M2_HOME/bin to the PATH in my ~/.bashrc.

With this install I get the latest Maven release together with the command completion from the Debian package. So I can type mvn and then use tab and get a list of options and lifecycle goals as well as use tab for command completion(see /etc/bash_completion.d/maven2 for details). Pretty sweet. As a lazy programmer I go one step further and add a bunch of aliases to my ~/.bashrc for often used commands.


alias mci='mvn clean install'
alias mcc='mvn clean compile'
alias mct='mvn clean test'
alias mi='mvn install'
alias mc='mvn compile'
alias mct='mvn test'
alias mcis='mvn clean install -Dmaven.test.skip=true'
alias mis='mvn install -Dmaven.test.skip=true'
alias mej='mvn exec:java'


Depending on projects I work with I also add specific aliases using profiles that need to used and more to additional aliases.

As the last but not least important job I install Sonatype Nexus as my local repository server. The instructions for the install in the Nexus book are all you need. I install Nexus on my developer machine for the following reasons:

• it acts as my local proxy allowing me to pretty much work offline smoothly without needing to use the offline mode in most cases.
• I can clean out my ~/.m2/repository folder for debugging or other issues (IDE slowdown..) and getting things back afterwards is MUCH faster
• I can use it to install thirdparty jars more permanently (e.g. the android jar or oracle jdbc driver jar) in a clean manner without polluting my ~/.m2/repository or depending on an external private repo server
• I can test the release plugin usage against my local proxy server

So there you have it. Thats all the steps I go through to install Maven and then I bathe in luxury ;-)

Ubuntu is a very user friendly Linux version and installing Java is very easy. All you have to do is sudo apt-get install sun-java6-jdk and off you go. You can also just use the synaptic package manager, if you are too lazy to open up a command line and want to do some mouse clicking. Thats certainly easier than manually downloading and running setup.exe with question here and there. And it is Java 6, which is more performant than Java 5 and offers better desktop and user interface features. Certainly the way to go for normal users. They can then just go of and user Java webstart on all sorts of cool applications.

A much touted feature of Feisty is the inclusion of the NetBeans IDE and the Glassfish app server. Although I think that both products are actually great, the Ubuntu integration is somewhat suboptimal.

For Netbeans you need to download the tar from the netbeans website first, copy it to /tmp and then do the package install. What a pain! The same ridiculous procedure is actually necessary for the Sun JDK documentation package. From my experience with creating a binary package of Squirrel SQL Client (soon to be release on this site) it would have been easy to wrap it all together. Apparently there are some copyright issues and a fix for this in the works. Anyway.. if you are serious developer and want to give NetBeans a spin I would suggest to head over to the NetBeans site and get a milestone release of NetBeans 6. Compared to this upcoming release NetBeans 5.5 sucks. NetBeans 6 seriously rocks as an IDE for Java, Ruby and more.

The Glassfish install turned me off since it required Java 5 although I had Java 6 already installed. Should only be a bug in the packaging – as far as I can tell the dependency to the JRE is missing the option for Java 6. I have to find out where to post the bug yet. Any ideas?

All in all the Feisty release is a GREAT step forward for Java and Linux. Now the packaging of all the cool Java apps can begin in serious.

Keep in mind that is going to be my all encompassing workstation and media box and I got lots of space so I really don’t care too much about one or two programs being installed I rarely or never use.

So lets start with some basic stuff. In the following I will just mention package names. You can install them from the command line with sudo apt-get install packagename or sudo aptitude install packagename or use the shell program aptitude without commands using its UI. Or you can use the GUI tool synaptic. There are others but lets not worry for now.

My editor(not IDE) of choice is vim so I install vim-full and vim-gnome.

As a next step I install the kubuntu-desktop since my desktop environment of choice is KDE and I use quite a few of the apps coming with Kubuntu all the time. There are digikam for all my photo archival needs, k3b for burning cd’s and dvd’s and kontact for all my PIM stuff.

When it comes to writing large documents I am still an avid LaTeX user. Nothing I have seen comes close to it. The easiest way to install it is to install kile. It is a great editor for TeX documents and has the dependencies so you are mostly ready to go with installing it. I also installed tetex-extras to get pdftex and other goodies. A last TeX related addition is latex2html. Very helpful ;-)

No lets go more to the graphical stuff. Ubuntu already comes with GIMP, but just for kicks I also like to check out the excellent krita now and then. In the next while I also want to play with panorama photos and I have been eyeing hugin for a while. Now it can be found in the repositories. Yeah!

To get some more goodies like the excellent vector drawing program inkscape, the desktop publishing program scribus and the 3D modelling and rendering program blender I just install ubuntustudio-graphics. There might be some more interesting programs I have yet to play with there as well.

For my video editing I can use a similar approach. Just install ubuntustudio-video. There is also a ubuntustudio-audio package that has a lot of good stuff, but I am just not an audio nut enough to bother. In terms of video I also install kino, kino-plus and dvgrab, which should be part of the studio… I also want to have a go at cinelerra at some stage, but that is not yet in the repositories.

As a last pointer for now here is some media players I install: vlc, xine-ui and mplayer including mozilla-mplayer.

Thats it for today. More another time.