Woshiadai Dev Notebook

Finally, I decided to do the upgrade. It was not as smooth as it looks, especially that I turned on 64 bit as default. Normally, SL runs in 32 bit mode, you need to hold 6 and 4 keys during the boot process to get into 64 bit mode. But you can also change the config to run it as default, instruction is here.

Most of the applications still runs fine, here is a few exceptions that I encountered and luckily all of them have solutions so far. Here is a list of compatibility check for SL, note that it is not the default 64 bit mode. 

1. menumeter: This is a small monitoring tool that I use every day, to check network, CPU, memory usage. Good thing is it displays info on the menu bar. Old installation not working anymore, just get the latest and reinstall.

2. delicioussafari: This is a plugin for Safari that saves and opens your delicious online bookmarks. To fix the issue, just get the latest and reinstall. The new version even has a new BMW-like button  

3. macfuse: This is a handy tool to help mount various file systems. Here is the fix for 32 bit SL mode, however it did not work for 64 bit mode. You can use this pre-compiled dmg for 64 bit mode. It runs great for me. You can also roll your own following the instructions here.

4. TextMate: It has lots of issues with SL, especially due to the upgrade of Ruby. First, try to get the latest release possible. But still, I am having issues with ⌘R. Textmate blog has some workarounds and I have not tried them yet, hopefully they will fix the problems in the next release.

5. MacPorts: This is another thing that caused many headache until I found this nice blog that suggests a fresh install. It worked all fine. However, occasionally, some ports will still report error of unmatched architecture. This blog also covers "Upgrading to Snow Leopard Part 1 to 7", talking about python, mysql and other upgrade tips, very handy! He also talks about building 32 bit packages using arch and lipo.

6. VMWare Fusion: The old 2.x version even won’t start in 64 bit and asks you to restart SL in 32 bit. So, you need to get the latest Fusion 3.0. The upgrade is not free.

After a week of being little white mouse running 64 bit SL. I’d say maybe running 64 bit does cause more issues than benefits. But we can debate over it. Here is a good intro if you are interested.

The best part for me is that I got back 12G free space, very interesting. It seems to be a combination of using 1000 for 1024 in calculation and cut the new OS installation size.

Netbeans has been making a lot of progress since version 6 and the latest 6.7 RC3 is even better. For those Eclipse fans, I strongly suggest that you check out Netbeans. It feels much faster and consumes less memory. The plugins are more organized and easy to manage (I think the plugin management in Eclipse is really messy).

The PHP plugin for Netbeans is out of beta and it is quite user friendly and versatile. So, I decided to switch from PDT to Netbeans for my PHP development.

Netbeans comes with Subversion support. However, it is not so smooth to set up Subversion over SSH on Mac OS X due to the ssh-askpass problem. This is a Mac OS X issue, not a Netbeans issue.

1. Download and install Netbeans 6.7 RC3 (as of June 25, 2009).
2. The subversion that comes with Mac OS X (/usr/bin/svn, 1.4.4 (r25188)) is quite outdated and it has problems working with newer versions of the SVN server, probably due to different format of the metadata. You need to use MacPorts to install a more recent subversion (if you don’t know how to install MacPorts, check out this). Just type this in your terminal: port install subversion, it might take a white. The subversion from MacPorts is installed in /opt/local/bin, so make sure you put /opt/local/bin before /usr/bin in your PATH environment variable.
3. Add SVNROOT and SVN_SSH environment variables to your .bashrc:
   
export SVNROOT=svn+ssh://your_svn_server/
export export SVN_SSH=/usr/bin/ssh

4. Launch Netbeans, go to preferences->Miscellaneous->Versioning->Subversion, for “path to SVN executable file”, enter /opt/local/bin
5. Now, it seems like everything is ready. However, when you try to do update/diff and other operations, you get error: ssh_askpass: exec(/usr/libexec/ssh-askpass): No such file or directory. I did some Yahoo! search and the problem is that Netbeans wants to communicate with SVN server over ssh without asking your password using ssh-askpass, but it is not available. This is a general ssh issue on Mac OS X.

   I found two solutions: solution 1 and solution 2. I only tried solution 2 and it worked perfectly for me. Here are the simple steps:

   a) download script from here (note that I had to add .jpg since blogsome only supports image upload) and save it in /usr/libexec. Change ssh-askpass script to executable:
   wget wget http://woshiadai.blogsome.com/images/sshaskpass.jpg -O ssh-askpass
sudo cp ssh-askpass /usr/libexec/ssh-askpass
sudo chmod a+x /usr/libexec/ssh-askpass

   b) add two more environment variables:
   
export SSH_ASKPASS=macos-askpass
export DISPLAY=:0


6. Finally, you can use subversion actions from inside Netbeans. You will be asked for password for the first time, then it will be remembered for future activities.

   Enjoy the Netbeans!

I have been using Mac for quite a while, but did not have much time to explore many of its features. Today, I managed to find how to do easy VNC to my linux box using Screen Share application, a hidden treasure.

First, follow the instructions here to set up the Screen Share application. Somehow I could get the advanced toolbar working.

Second, you need to set up the VNC server on your linux box. In my case, Redhat Enterprise comes with VNC server installed already. All I need is to configure it properly. Follow this nicely written tutorial to start your VNC server. There are two ways in this tutorial: use the build-in remote desktop setup, or the DIY configuration. I chose the 2nd option since it is much flexible and the first one did not really worked for me.

Third, connect to your VNC server. In my case, I just typed in hostname:5091 and clicked connect in Screen Sharing, then it starts working, really cool!

I think you should be able to do the same with a Windows machine running VNC server, but I did not try that.