No More Windoze
Well, the time has come to find a new distribution since Redhat will no longer be providing support for 8.0(current version supporting this site). Since Im most familiar with Redhat, Fedora was an obvious choice for my new distro. To ease into this transition and guarantee zero downtime, Ive decided to install Fedora onto the only Windoze box that I currently have. Thats right, my only windoze box will run windoze no more. I guess one could argue that Im upgrading the OS. My plan is to install everything on this machine that my current Redhat 8.0 server provides. My current "can't live without" installed apps are JBoss, MySQL, JAMES, and CVS. Once these are all up and running, Ill do the same to the Redhat 8.0. This will give me poor mans failover in case of a vaporized hard disk or some other hardware failure. I say poor mans failover since redirecting traffic will involve manual reconfiguration of my router.
Fedora Core
Bootup with Disk 1 in CDROM
1) Language Selection
English
2) Keyboard Configuration
U.S. English
3) Mouse Configuration
Generic Wheel Mouse (PS/2)
4) Monitor Configuration
Sony Multiscan 17sf
5) Installation Type
Workstation
6) Disk Partitioning Setup
Manually partition with Disk Druid
7) Disk Setup
/dev/hda1 nfts
/dev/hda2 /boot
/dev/hda3 /
/dev/hda4 swap
8) Boot Loader Configuration
WinXP /dev/hda1 default
Fedora Core /dev/hda3
9) Network Configuration
hostname: pegasus.shoesobjects.com
manual network settings
10) Firewall configuration
No firewall
11) Additional Language Support
none
12) Timezone Selection
America/Chicago
13) Set Root Password
13) Package Installation Defaults
customize software packages to be installed
+ KDE Desktop Environment
+ Server Configuration Tools
Fedora HOWTO apt-get Download the apt-get RPM for Fedora Core here. Once you have installed it, you will need to retrieve an up to date package list using the following command apt-get update. Now that we have the latest package listing for everything installed on the system, we should upgrade the installed packages to the latest and greatest versions. Upon running apt-get upgrade, I see that I have 32 packages to upgrade. By typing a Y at the prompt, I will begin to download all of the upgraded packages, 56.3MB to be specific. Gee, this kinda feels like windows update except I don't have to reboot afterwards :)
Other Packages Installed
More to come.........
New strategy for commented code
After looking over loads and loads of code, Ive come to the conclusion that commenting out dead code is often done incorrectly. Typically you will see something like this.
public void doSomething(String myString) {
//for(int i=0; i<10; i++) {
// callSomething();
//}
}
This is all wrong. First you never know when this was commented out. Secondly, its hard to tell who commented it out. The whole point of leaving this code is for documentation purposes right? This kind of documentation doesn't seem complete now does it? Im suggesting that the programmer insert his/her initials and the date that these lines of code were tagged defunct. Im not telling you anything new, am I? Didn't think so. Actually, the more that I think about it, that is a pretty crappy way to handle the situation!
Any true software professional would not do such a thing. Its ridiculous to leave such crud scattered in source code. If the project you are working on has no version control software, then download CVS. Not only is it free and easy to install, its one of the most widely used CM tools around. Virtually every open source project is managed using it. If you don't like CVS, pick any other version control tool that suits your fancy. By doing so, you give yourself the safety net of always being able to get back to where you were previously. Just about everyone understands this fundamental concept, so why does defunct code exist? Somebody somewhere must be getting paid by the size of source files, that is the only reasonable solution.
// If anyone has an explanation or other ideas, please drop me a line.