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The Open Source solutions continue to be more numerous and feature laden every day. For the vast number of common jobs that users do on their computer you will always find good open source solutions. I am not so sure about all the highly custom niche tasks that many businesses find them selves supporting. Apache chairman: Days numbered for commercial software

I recently gave up on Windows XP for my notebook and reformatted it for Vector Linux only. I was using dual boot for a while but it’s high time that I gave up on windows and emersed myself in the linux world. The installer for the SOHO edition of Vector Linux was a dream. It’s a text based installer but was easy to follow the prompts and then let it go. Once it starts up all your favorites like Java, Open Office and FireFox are already there, thats one of the benefits of going with the SOHO edition. I am using KDE 3.5 from the deluxe disk and it works very well. It’s got some nice eye candy but the best thing I can say about it is that it’s fast and responsive. Thats why I started using Vector Linux in the first place. It’s built on Slackware optimized for older hardware but when you run it on more modern equipment you will find its very hard to beat. The Vector guys are also distributing snapshots of Enlightnment DR17. I love this desktop and can’t wait for development to to be done. Try it out on your favorite distro, but be warned, many features are missing or broken so you will encounter unexpected problems. This is to be expected because its under very active development. There is no word on when they will have an official release so it might be a while. For those wanting to know more I found this to be a good overview: Review of Vector Linux 5.1.1 SOHO deluxe

Eric Burke has recently posted a tip on adding synchronization for your flash drive. This is a great way to put the power of subversion to work. SVN is so simple an easy to use that I would expect cool ideas like this to be very common in the hacker community.

Previously I had written about the problem of having too many technologies to stay on top of in software engineering. There are a few techniques I use in order to stay in the loop, one of them is iPodder. This is not a replacement for study and practice; ‘hands on’ is always the best way to learn something and retain it.
Download the iPodder from sourceforge and give it a try. After the iPodder is installed you can subscribe to some of the podcasts that they already have listed in their directory just to get started quickly . They cover every topic under the sun but many of them focus on various technologies and niche topics. iPodder has a nice scheduling feature so you can have it check for new audio in the middle of the night when you are not using your internet connection. If you can leave your MP3 player connected to your PC while it charges then you can set up iPodder to copy the new files to your player when they are ready.

Version control is a critical part of any successful development team. You might think that your project is small or that no one else will be joining the team so version control is not needed. This is dangerous thinking because the future is always surprising. Your assumptions may be wrong but even if they are not, a good version control system will still save you countless hours of rework and frustration. Note that I said a good system, many teams out in the wild are still wasting time with Microsoft’s visual source safe (VSS) every day. Historically CVS has been the system of choice for those wanting something reliable with a low cost. CVS does a much better job than VSS in almost every way, (cost, reliability, features). If you have ever tried to use VSS remotely or had multiple developers changing the same files you know what I mean. CVS however has some limitations and Subversion has started to replace many installations. Subversion was designed to be a replacement for CVS and fixed some of the warts that it had. I highly recommend Subversion and I will be documenting my reasons here along with some good practices. Before I get started you should visit The Free Online Book which has been one of the most commonly referenced to documentation on the topic. Subversion gets much of its power from simplicity. As you would expect the repository can contain any number of folders that contain other folders or files. These folders can be set up to represent almost any structure but the convention has been to set up 3 main folders for any given project; Trunk, Branches and Tags. The Subversion(SVN) books to date have taken a different perspective on how these 3 folders should be used because none of this has been well defined by the SVN development team or source documents. Why should it be? How you use SVN depends greatly on what you expect to get out of it. The simple design of the product allows for many innovations helping us improve how developers work together. Based on my experiences, I believe this is the best way to use SVN for a project.

• Trunk Keep the latest working copy in trunk unless this is a new project, in which case the folder is empty until your first commit. The code in trunk will always successfully compile and pass the automated unit tests. Developers, testers, management or anyone else who needs a reliable working copy can always go to trunk.
• Branches All development work requiring any significant time will be done in folders under the branches folder. The developers are free to commit their work daily or more frequently and even rollback without impacting the rest of the team. This frees them up to focus on the software instead of loosing any previous work. Once the new changes are done and tested the branch will be merged into the trunk. After the merged trunk is tested and those changes committed the specific work folder under branches can be deleted.
• Tags When significant milestones or external releases are achieved the trunk is copied to a specific folder under the tags folder. If legacy maintenance becomes necessary the tagged folder can be branched to complete the work. This will be critical if different versions of the project must be supported simultaneously.

PROJECT NAME |-trunk | |-SRC AND OTHER DEVELOPMENT FOLDERS | |-tags | |-myfirstrelease | | |-SRC AND OTHER DEVELOPMENT FOLDERS | | | |-ver2.0 | | |-SRC AND OTHER DEVELOPMENT FOLDERS | |-branches | |-feature32 | | |-SRC AND OTHER DEVELOPMENT FOLDERS | | | |-issue20 | | |-SRC AND OTHER DEVELOPMENT FOLDERS Cool features of Subversion in no particular order:

• Backups are easy. If all the users are logged out svnadmin dump can be used for a reliable backup. If there are users who will not leave then svnadmin hotcopy can be used for a quick backup.
• Nothing is ever deleted. Even delete gets a revision number and you can always fetch old revisions even if the folder is no longer part of the current revision.
• Folder renames. Folders can be renamed while retaining their history.
• Atomic commits. When committing a group of changes to the repository they will all be done at once or none at all. This helps prevents anyone from getting a partial commit or broken copy of the code base.
• Fast light weight copy for branches Branches are light weight copies so they are cheap and made quickly. When you start making changes to the new branch only the difference from the master copy need to be kept saving time and hardrive space.
• Rollback is easy The merge command can be used to quickly rollback your working folder.

Other reference material: Setup Subversion for Java development with Eclipse. More links from Google