Development

Creating the VM and installing Ubuntu Download the Ubuntu .iso from http://www.ubuntu.com/ In this case I used VMware Fusion. Start VMware Fusion and follow these steps: Click on File->New... Click on "Continue without disc" Click on "Choose a disc or disc image..." twice Select your Ubuntu .iso file. I used: ubuntu-12.04.1-desktop-i386.iso Click on "Open" Click on "Continue" Verify that the Operating System shows as "Linux" and that the Version shows as "Ubuntu" Click on "Continue" Select "Use Easy Install" Type your full name into the Display Name field Type your desired account name into the Account Name field (choose wisely; you can't change it) Select a password I have files on my host machine that I want to share with the VM, so I selected "Make your home folder accessible to the virtual machine" For now, I left the access level at "Read only". We can chan...

Useful tools to install # # Editors. You should install both of these. # sudo yum -y install vim-enhanced emacs sudo yum -y install emacs # # Useful and fun languages. # sudo yum -y install perl ruby sudo yum -y install ghc                           # Haskell sudo yum -y install gcc gcc-c++ clang    # You should have two compilers # # Development support tools. # sudo yum -y install perf valgrind # # Source code revision control. # sudo yum -y install git sudo yum -y install gitg sudo yum -y install gitk Bash configuration Add these lines to your .bashrc file: # Source global definitions if [ -f /etc/bashrc ]; then . /etc/bashrc fi # don't put duplicate lines in the history. See bash(1) for more options export HISTCONTROL=ignoredups # ... and ignore same sucessive entries. export HISTCONTROL=ignoreboth # ... and add timestamps export HISTTIMEFORMAT="[%F %T] " # ch...

Setup You can use just about any host OS and host hardware to run VMWare. In my case, I am using: MacBook Air Host OS: OS X Mountain Lion 8 GBytes RAM VMWare Fusion 5.0.2 Download a Fedora ISO. I selected: Fedora-18-x86_64-Live-Desktop.iso. That failed miserably. When I tried to install this version, it just got stuck at a stripey blue screen. It's not the standalone installer. It is for installing side-by-side with another host OS. Don't use this one. You can download the latest from here: http://fedoraproject.org/en/get-fedora-options#formats. Select the Fedora 18 DVD. The full download path resolved to: http://download.fedoraproject.org/pub/fedora/linux/releases/18/Fedora/x86_64/iso/Fedora-18-x86_64-DVD.iso Create a New Virtual Machine Start VMware Fusion. Click on File->New... Click "Continue without disc" Click twice on "Choose a disc or disc image" Select the ISO you just downloaded. Click "Continue" When prompted ...

SVN Properties Line Endings When you check files out of SVN it can update the line endings for you. In "native" mode it will give CR/LF line endings on Windows and LF line endings on *nix. If you want to force a line ending, set it with this command: svn propset svn:eol-style LF myfile.c Executables If a file is an executable and you don't want SVN to change the line endings, tag it as an executable with this command: svn propset svn:executable ON somescript SVN Externals If you want to chain checkouts together, use the SVN external property. Do this while in the directory in which you want the new checkout to appear: svn propset svn:externals 'commonFiles http://svn.url.com/src/trunk' . Checking out a sparse tree Sometimes you only want to check out parts of a large SVN tree. You can do that one checkout at a time, but then the checkouts are not all tied together (for instance, you could not "svn up" the whole tree). m...

My first foray into the Kindle Fire development environment The urge struck me the other day to try developing a simple application for Android. To get started at a low cost I purchased the Kindle Fire. Probably not the ideal development platform to start with, but it was cheap and quick to obtain. Aren't there many, many pages out there on how to set up for Kindle Fire development? Yes! However, I found I had to search through quite a few of them to piece together the entire setup process. Thus, I am documenting it here for my later use should I need to re-install it. Note that the Kindle Fire is not running the latest release of Android. It appears to be running a branch of the 2.3 (Gingerbread) OS. You can see more information about that on Wikipedia here:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kindle_Fire  Be sure that when you are developing your application you develop to that version of Android. There is a lot that has been added since then. Don't start using any of tho...