Ketan's Musings

Jruby-in a jar already bundles rspec and rake, so the goal was to find out where it gets packaged.

Download the jruby source zip, extract it and open the build.xml file, search for “rspec” (there’s two occurences) and you’ll find that it’s passed in as an argument to the gem installer, add in another line with “cucumber”:

<target name="install-gems">
  <property name="jruby.home" value="${basedir}"/>
  <java classname="org.jruby.Main" fork="true" maxmemory="${jruby.launch.memory}" failonerror="true">
    <classpath refid="build.classpath"/>
    <classpath path="${jruby.classes.dir}"/>
    <sysproperty key="jruby.home" value="${jruby.home}"/>
    <arg value="--command"/>
    <arg value="maybe_install_gems"/>
    <arg value="rspec"/>
    <arg value="rake"/>
    <arg value="cucumber"/> <!-- add cucumber -->
    <arg value="--env-shebang"/>
  </java>
</target>

Then run ant:

$ ant jar-complete

To verify that everything is fine:

$ java -jar lib/jruby-complete.jar -S gem list

*** LOCAL GEMS ***

builder (2.1.2)
cucumber (0.2.3)
diff-lcs (1.1.2)
polyglot (0.2.5)
rake (0.8.4)
rspec (1.2.2)
sources (0.0.1)
term-ansicolor (1.0.3)
treetop (1.2.5)

Great we’ve now managed to package jruby-in-a-jar with some additional gems. Now to run cucumber on jruby in eclipse.

Here’s how to get your firefox running on a 64 bit Linux machine to work with 32 bit plugins. I’ve tried this with gentoo, it should work with ubuntu or kubuntu or any other distro of your choice.

Download and install nspluginwrapper from http://gwenole.beauchesne.info/projects/nspluginwrapper/.

For ubuntu, there are some instructions on how to do this here (http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=341727). On gentoo I had to

 #emerge nspluginwrapper

Download the flash installer from the website here: http://fpdownload.macromedia.com/get/flashplayer/current/install_flash_player_9_linux.tar.gz. Untar the installer:

$ tar -zxvf install_flash_player_9_linux.tar.gz

Step into the installer directory:

cd install_flash_player_9_linux

Edit the installer file:

vi flashplayer-installer #use nano or gedit if you like

Navigate to line 47 (this inside the function exit_cpu) and comment out the line that says exit 1.

# the architecture is not supported
exit_cpu () {
  echo ""
  echo "ERROR: Your architecture, \'$1\', is not supported by the"
  echo "       $PRODUCT installer."
  echo ""
  #exit 1   # this was line 47
}

Install the flash plugin, I used the default paths, you can choose the paths according to what you have on your computer (I used /home/ketan/.mozilla)

./flashplayer-installer

Now verify that the plugin actually got installed in the directory that you specified

$ ls /home/ketan/.mozilla/plugins

Use nspluginwrapper to create a 64-bit wrapper around this 32 bit plugin. (thanks to Lance for a typo update)

$ nspluginwrapper -i /home/ketan/.mozilla/plugins/libflashplayer.so

Now restart firefox, that should get you to run firefox with flash player.

I saw this post by ZX on Lotus Notes 8 based on the Eclipse platform.

ZX says:

…
In the end, this is great news for Eclipse which now gets to interact with a whole new set of users and developers.

Eclipse (OSGi) on clients… devices… servers… , what’s next?
…

OSGi is great on my desktop, laptop, servers, even mobile phones. But lotus notes based on OSGi ? I’m a die hard Eclipse fan and developer. But when it comes to usability of the software that I have to use everyday I’m a tough guy to convince.

For another potshot at this installer (for now) it is about 673 MB, is packaged as a .tar (Anyone at IBM lotus notes packaging team heard about something called as gzip/bzip2?) The documentation (which is about a total of 3MB) comes as a separate download. While it is a good idea to package the documentation separately I wonder if the installer comes with some documentation.

I just hope that I do not have to go through all these pains and musings and some more pains to install Lotus Notes 8. Especially after downloading something that is 673 MB.

The Important Disclaimer: ALL VIEWS POSTED IN THIS PARTICULAR ENTRY ARE THAT OF MY OWN AND DO NOT (NECESSARILY) REFLECT THE OPINIONS OF MY EMPLOYER.

That said, this is in addition to a HOWTO on installing the Lotus Notes 7.0 Client on Ubuntu.

I’d rather that a very popular lotus notes fan tell you more on why lotus notes is a great tool! What I focus here is on some inside stuff that I figured while installing the lotus notes client on my laptop. Stuff that could have possibly been done in a far better way.

I did this merely as an “educational exercise” to understand if it would be possible to fool the installer into thinking that all is fine, so that it can go ahead installing lotus notes. To give you a brief about how the installer works:
Read the rest of this entry »

This morning I tried installing Lotus Notes 7.0 on Ubuntu Edgy-Eft.

I ran into the notoriously infamous “Could not validate mozilla version” message, that I’d seen a lot of times before. In case you also run into this problem. Here’s a howto to get you out:

Note: These steps are to be run as root

1. Install libmotif3:
sudo apt-get install libmotif3

2. Install gtk1.2:
sudo apt-get install libgtk1.2

3. Remove dash:
sudo apt-get remove dash

4. Create a location where you want to install Lotus Notes:
sudo mkdir -p "/opt/IBM/Workplace Managed Client/"

5. Make this directory writable by you:
sudo chown ketan.ketan "/opt/IBM/Workplace Managed Client/"

Note: None of these steps are to be performed as root

1. Extract the Lotus Notes package:
unzip /opt/downloads/C93D1NA.zip -d notes

2. Change into the directory where you just extracted notes:
cd notes

3. Extract the Lotus Notes installer:
unzip Personality.zip

4. Change some file permissions:
chmod 755 setuplinux.bin setup_wct_platform.bin

5. Copy the setup file to the correct location:
cp setuplinux.bin updateSite/features/com.ibm.workplace.notesinstall.linux.feature_7.0.1.0000-0900/bin/linux

6. Now we are all set up to install:
./setup_wct_platform.bin

That should be able to get you through the installer. Add a comment on this entry in case you are unable to get things done.

Update on 23rd March, 2007: Does lotus notes not work even after these instructions ?