New software.

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New software.

This site is now running Tomcat 5 and MySQL 4. The site seems quite a bit faster, which is of course a good thing. Now that I'm running on MySQL 4, both at home and on this site, I would like to add referential integrity to the Roller database. To that end, I've been reading up on MySQL and playing around with DBDesigner4, an ERWin-like database modeling tool recommended by Scott Switzer on the Roller dev-list. DBDesigner4 is an impressive piece of software with a very slick user interface and, best of all, DBDesigner4 is free -- licensed under GPL.

Last week, I bought a copy of Dragon Naturally Speaking Prefered for Windows (about $150 including microphone headset). I'm using it to dictate this weblog entry and it is working very well. It took only about 10 minutes to train Dragon to understand my mumbly and lispy voice. Dragon works well, but to use it effectively you must think before speaking and you must speak very clearly. This is really not a problem because just about everybody, and especially mumbly me, needs practice thinking before speaking and speaking clearly.

I'm getting a new desktop machine at work and I'm trying to decide which Linux distribution to use. I'm going to use the machine for development work using Eclipse, Tomcat, and PostgreSQL. The guys down the hall like Gentoo, but the consensus among RTPBloggers is that Debian is a better choice -- much more mature, stable, and widely-supported. I'm assuming that Eclipse is stable on both Gentoo and Debian, please correct me if I'm wrong.

Dave Johnson in General 02:00PM Mar 29, 2004 Comments [11]
Tags: General

Comments:

I'd use Fedora, but I'm biased ;) I haven't had any problems with Fedora Core 1 at home. I've been using it for several months now.

Posted by Jesus M. Rodriguez on March 29, 2004 at 10:05 PM EST #

Yes, you are biased now aren't you. I like Redhat and I've been using Redhat longer than any other distribution. I started with Slackware back in the pre-1.0 kernel days, then switched to Redhat, then Mandrake, and then back to Redhat. Now, I'm in the mood to try something different and I've only heard good things about Gentoo and Debian.

Posted by Dave Johnson on March 29, 2004 at 10:41 PM EST #

I have been using RedHat Enterprise Workstation for development with Eclipse and Tomcat (and Oracle 10g AS which appears to be Orion under the hood). Pretty good results unless I try to use MyEclipse, in which case, the system gradually gets slower and slower to unusability requiring a reboot.

Posted by Brad Smith on March 29, 2004 at 11:31 PM EST #

I use Gentoo, and have been using it for several years. For my money, it's the easiest to keep running with the latest and greatest stuff. My Gentoo server under my desk is running Tomcat 5, MySQL 4, Subversion 1.0, Apache 2, and all sorts of other stuff, all installed using Gentoo's native package system. I used it as a desktop OS on a laptop for a long time and was quite pleased with it there as well. The fact that the guys down the hall can support it for you makes Gentoo a no brainer if you ask me. (I've used Debian before, but it never clicked for some reason.)

Posted by Rafe on March 29, 2004 at 11:58 PM EST #

I have to add one for Gentoo. I'm using it on our servers and on my Desktop and now on a brandnew laptop. It is a great development machine and since using the latest kernel and NPTL threading all things Java seem to fly. At least Eclipse 3M7 is really snappy and feels a lot smoother than on the other boot option WinXp Pro. Can only recommend it. Also: the Gentoo folks seem to have quite an interest in Java and so Java support is really good overall (lots of the latest JREs/JDKs, Jikes, Ant, Maven and the system tool java-config to switch between JDKs - cool)

Posted by Joerg Erdmenger on March 30, 2004 at 03:06 AM EST #

Throw away linux.. Get Mac OS X :).. Eclipse works great !

Posted by Steve Rancid on March 30, 2004 at 02:45 PM EST #

I would love to install Mac OS X. Please send me the necessary hardware!

Posted by Dave Johnson on March 30, 2004 at 03:06 PM EST #

How did the upgrade to mysql 4 go? Did you change the table types?

Posted by Lance on March 30, 2004 at 07:29 PM EST #

The upgrade went smoothly. My tables do not seem to be InnoDB tables, so I still need to figure out how to change that and how to add my foreign key relationships.

Posted by Dave Johnson on March 30, 2004 at 10:22 PM EST #

BTW, JRoller is now running on MySQL 4.1.1, we didn't have any problems upgrading from the old 3.23.58 version that was there before. So far seems fast and stable. One thing to watch out for: before sure to use the latest stable version of the JDBC driver from MySQL, not their alpha! The alpha tends to cause mysql to crash.

Posted by Matthew Schmidt on March 31, 2004 at 07:58 AM EST #

Matthew, are you using the UTF8 support in MySql 4.1? The next release of Roller uses UTF8 everywhere (or tries to), but real support is dependant on so many variables - including the database (and the jvm, and the servlet container) - being configured properly. See one of Roller's JIRA issues.

Posted by Lance on March 31, 2004 at 01:17 PM EST #

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