February 22, 2002
Another one bites the dust
Its like shying coconuts at the fair. One of my (soon to be ex) colleagues is fed up with working with proprietary software. I'd just like to point out that he is not a programmer, nor is he an analyst, a database administrator or any sort of technical type. By training he is an engineer and by profession he is an order management expert who helps companies implement Oracle Applications. But fed up with bad service, buggy code and exorbitant license fees he started asking the question why? Or, more correctly, isn't there a better way? I pointed him in the direction of GNU Enterprise and open/free source/software has another convert. Whats great about this person is that he brings subject matter experience with him. He is not just another frustrated coder who shuffles paper during the day and does what he enjoys in his own time (like me). He is someone who can help specify the actual, real world, requirement for some software that will make a difference.
Open source isn't just for programmers, it needs authors, designers, artists and people like my colleague with solution space knowledge. Do yourself a favour and recruit someone today.
Posted by Andy Todd at 03:05 PM | Comments (0)
February 20, 2002
Debian Configuration
Finally, I'll post something postive. I have resolved the problems I talked about in my post on the 9th of January. In essence the solution is quite simple. Isn't it always. Each line in the /etc/apt/sources.list file is comprised of a valid URL and then a list of debian 'modules'. I use the word 'module' because I still don't know the correct name for these things. Anyway, my problem was that the first part of some of the lines in my sources.list file was not a valid URL. All I needed to do was cut and paste the URL into a web browser and see if it resolved to a valid location. If it didn't I back tracked the directory structure until I found the correct location. Hardly easy to do or intuitive, but I got there in the end. I should probably write an article for debianHELP and maybe I will.
In the absence of that article, here is what my (now working) sources.list file looks like (I've removed the comment lines for brevity);
deb http://http.us.debian.org/debian testing main contrib non-free
deb http://ftp.au.debian.org/pub/debian testing main contrib non-free
deb http://ftp.au.debian.org/pub/debian-non-US testing/non-US main contrib non-free
Posted by Andy Todd at 11:34 AM | Comments (0)