ubuntu

Install XMind to Fedora

/ jankka / 2 Comments

I’ve been using XMind a lot for mindmapping. It has fulfilled my needs somewhat well, at least I cannot come up with anything to nag about from the top of my head.

Except that there is only *.deb -package available for Linux. For the love of <pick your favorite deity here>. Not all of us are using Ubuntu. Don’t get me wrong, Ubuntu is ok to use. I’m not using it due to our servers are running CentOS. To get to know the issues you might run into when dealing with production, you should be using same (or at least one that is based on the same architecture) operating system on your workstation. So i do have Fedora, which is not CentOS, but close enough. I do admit being lazy here, there is CentOS -desktop available, but to get the tools needed to work with that is so much harder than with Fedora, that I did not even try this time. I might do that in the future, though.

Enough for OS rant.

  1. Download Xmind for linux from vendor site
  2. Uncompress the deb -package with ar
    1. [bluntinstrument@testing Downloads]$ ar -x xmind-x.y-xyz-linux_amd64.deb
  3. There will be 2 tarballs extracted, data.tar.gz & control.tar.gz
  4. Untar data.tar.gz:
    1. [bluntinstrument@testing Downloads]$ tar xf data.tar.gz
    2. You get a subfolder usr/
  5. [bluntinstrument@testing Downloads]$ sudo cp -r usr/bin/ /opt/xmind/
  6. [bluntinstrument@testing Downloads]$ sudo cp -r usr/lib/ /usr/
  7. [bluntinstrument@testing Downloads]$ sudo cp -r usr/share/ /usr/
  8. Untar control.tar.gz:
    1. [bluntinstrument@testing Downloads]$ tar xf control.tar.gz
    2. You get a script ‘postinst’
  9. [bluntinstrument@testing Downloads]$ sudo sh postinst
  10. Create symlink for XMind:
    1. sudo ln -s /opt/xmind/bin/XMind /usr/local/bin/XMind

And you’re good to go 😀

I used this guide as a reference: http://www.xmind.net/m/JKm6/ 

 

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Installing Ubuntu 15.04 on Dell Latitude D810

/ jankka / 1 Comment

I do have this old laptop. Dell Latitude D810. It is otherwise quite ok, display resolution is excellent, CPU power is enough for browsing etc. The only thing that bothers me is the lack of memory, or so to say the limits of memory you can use. 2 GB of memory is nowadays below the minimum.

However, it manages to keep my writing going on and web browsing is actually easier and more efficient than with the Asus Eee PC 1101HA, which seems to lack the rest of everything you need to work around.

Ok, enough babbling. Back to the actual topic:

Installation procedure was pretty simple (this time).

  • Download Ubuntu 15.04 (32-bit version)
  • Write the downloaded image to USB disk:
    1. Plug in the USB
    2. umount /dev/sdb (in case needed, I didn’t have to, my Arch linux did not automount the disk)
    3. ]$ dd bs=4M if=Downloads/ubuntu-15.04-desktop-i386.iso /dev/sdb
    4. Eject the USB -stick (eject /dev/sdb )
  • Plug in the USB stick to Dell Latitude D810
  • During the Start Up, press F12 and select USB device as the boot device
  • During the installation process, do not select the 3rd party software to be installed, it halts the computer.
  • If you have network cable, plug it in during the installation procedure and download the updates during the installation
  • After installation, restart the computer
  • When computer has been restarted, do the following:
    1. Open terminal (Ctrl+Alt+T)
    2. Run the following commands:
  ]$ sudo apt-get update
  ]$ sudo apt-get install firmware-b43-installer
  ]$ sudo modprobe -r b43 bcma
  ]$ sudo modprobe -r brcmsmac bcma
  ]$ sudo modprobe b43
  • Restart the computer

The information gathered above can be also found from Ubuntu WifiDocs -site. All I did was gathered it in a simplified list to be applied. Most likely the same approach should work to Debian, too.

Install Robot Framework to Ubuntu 14.04

/ jankka / 3 Comments

By following these fairly easy steps you can get the Robot Framework with Selenium2Library and SSHLibrary installed on Ubuntu 14.04. Now you could go and fetch the installation packages and for example compile everything from the scratch. That’s all just fine with ,e. Anyhow, you could also use these instructions and slip all the hassle.

First of all, to install everything, you will need to have pip. Pip is a Python package installer and it helps you out a lot in case you need to install anything related to Python.

  • Install pip 
    sudo apt-get install python-pip
  • Install Robot Framework
sudo pip install robotframework
  • Install Selenium2Library
sudo pip install robotframework-selenium2library
  • Install SSHLibrary
sudo pip install robotframework-sshlibrary

Now that was all I needed for getting started. However modifying the Robot Framework Test Cases from a text editor is a tricky business. So it would be wise to either use LibreOffice Calc or some other software that can read Tab Separated -files. There’s also a bunch of plugins for vim, Emacs, Sublime and Eclipse (or LiClipse) to get the TSV -format highlighted in the editor. The other way to do it is to use Robot Framework IDE, called RIDE. RIDE is indeed a decent tool for handling the keywords and variables in a correct format. The installation procedure, however, was not at all that straightforward as you might think. While you can install the RIDE with pip, you still need to have wxPython in order to run it.

  • Install RIDE
sudo pip install robotframework-ride
sudo apt-get install libwxgtk2.8-dev libwxgtk2.8-dbg
sudo apt-get install build-essential
sudo apt-get install python-wxtools python-wxgtk2.8-dbg

Now you can get the ride started on command line by easily writing ride.py on the terminal. Happy trails 😀 Next article should be about installing the whole stuff to Windows. Which seems to be a whole lot harder than it should be.

Cross platform rant

/ jankka / Leave a comment

I just can’t get it; How come it seems to be too difficult for developers provide a cross platform functionality that actually works? I mean come on you there. I’ve been learning to use this Robot Framework as the starting point for my own private ATDD -project (Called Marvin, due to Hitchhikers Guide to Galaxy, of course). This morning I started to create more test cases in order to start (later on) the development of the new log in -features. And I thought it would be a good use for my work laptop. Really, it has 16 GB of RAM, a processor and a hard drive. The only unfortunate thing about it is that it uses Windows 7. Due to reasons not quite clear to me, to be honest. It seems to have something to do with the IT -departments capabilities on monitoring and updating the end -users laptops and most likely the ability to remote -reset the hard drive in case the laptop is stolen. Or lost. Apparently the solution used there, in the wide America, is not flexible enough to be used in the real world. Well, now I’m just being nasty here, but still, we do develop stuff that runs above Linux and the development is done on windows. This of course applies to testing, too. Sigh.

Anyhow, everything worked just fine in the beginning. I did install the RobotFramework -eclipse -plugin and all. Ended up installing Robot Framework and its Selenium2Webdriver -library, too. Like I did last week on the Linux- & OSX- laptops. Like said, everything was fine. Until I had to actually execute the tests I had created.

I just can’t get the ancient profile -thinking Firefox keeps having on windows. Really. There’s no point of that. At the moment it actually really just slows down the development. And of course gains my frustration and gets me writing this blog -entry (which is not that bad thin, though). I tried to follow the instructions, too. Really guys, you who develop the Robot Framework, you could create a decent entry on how to configure Firefox and webdriver in Windows in order to get the test cases executed. All I found was Python Webdriver -instructions, which I have been using previously myself. Those do work. But there was no single entry anywhere that pointed to a working version of the setup.

So here I am; Browsing the web on my Firefox running on my ancient laptop that runs Ubuntu 14.04 LTS (With encrypted HardDrive, by the way) and getting ready to install the RobotFramework Eclipse -plugin to LiClipse pulling the latest changes from GitHub and executing the actual tests. In windows that was impossible (well ok, just NOT worth the effort), in Linux, it should not take more than 30 minutes for me to get a decent FAIL on the first test cases.