CDEpack: Code, Data, and Environment packaging for Linux from PGPGPG on Vimeo.

A friend of mine recently turned me on to a project named CDE, a packaging utility designed to make transferring apps between systems clean and simple.

When working “in the cloud”, its quite common for researchers to have a program they are working on and need to deploy that program with all its dependencies on many systems. Under heavy development these programs and their dependencies can change quite rapidly. Updating the environment on multiple systems can be time consuming.

CDE’s aim is to help alleviate this. By their own admission, this is not a replacement for time-tested production distribution systems like apt and yum. But for researchers looking to quickly deploy a rapidly changing application without worrying very much about the current state of the systems they are deploying to, this project could prove to be very useful.

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Query SVN log history and filter by username

svn log | sed -n '/username/,/-----$/ p'

Run the last command as root

sudo !!

Save a file you edited in vim without the needed permissions

:w !sudo tee %

Why is this command so awesome? Peter described it quite well:

This happens to me way too often. I open a system config file in vim and edit it just to find out that I don’t have permissions to save it. This one-liner saves the day. Instead of writing the while to a temporary file :w /tmp/foobar and then moving the temporary file to the right destination mv /tmp/foobar /etc/service.conf, you now just type the one-liner above in vim and it will save the file.

Change to the previous working directory

cd -

Run the previous shell command but replace string “foo” with “bar”

^foo^bar^

Find the last command that begins with “whatever,” but avoid running it

!whatever:p

Copy your public-key to remote-machine for public-key authentication

ssh-copy-id remote-machine

Capture video of a linux desktop

ffmpeg -f x11grab -s wxga -r 25 -i :0.0 -sameq /tmp/out.mpg

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Before I made the switch permanent, I was able to try out a “live” version of the Ubuntu system and was pleased to find that it not only picked up all the hardware in my netbook properly but that it also picked up the Bluetooth nano device I use to connect my mouse, phone, headphones, etc. I was also pleasantly surprised to find that proprietary things like mp3  playback and video codecs weren’t hard to find and install.

I was so impressed that I decided to switch my laptop over, even though the contract I am currently on requires Windows-specific plugins. What I found, though, is that even installing the Linux version of Paralells, Sun’s VirtualBox, was relatively painless.

I’ve always loved Debain but have shied away from it as a primary operating system (apart from servers, that is) because of my memories of poor hardware support in Linux distributions of the past. Not any more, though! I think Ubuntu (as well as other distros) are proving they have what it takes to compete in a real way.

The only thing left to figure out, however, is what I’m going to do to sync my phone (Treo 755p) and figure out how to use my phone as a modem via bluetooth. Oh well, what’s life without a challenge?

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