I have recently purchased a 3.5G USB modem from the Egyptian Mobile Broadband provider, Etisalat. So far I have tried all packages provided by Etisalat Egypt (384Kb and 3.6Mb) and I must say they're 100% working under Linux exactly as expected. Using NetworkManager 0.7 which is currently available in Ubuntu Intrepid Ibex, Gentoo and Debian Experimental, I managed to use the USB modem with few clicks under both KDE and GNOME. Etisalat ships with the modem a windows application to send SMS and browse SMS directory on the SIM. KMobileTools (KDE) managed to do the same job in a perfect way and I think gnome-phone-manager or gnokii can do exactly the same job.

After installing and playing around with Solr on my Gentoo box, I had to deploy the same stuff on Debian Lenny/sid.

The difference between the two distros wasn't huge but it worth mentioning that Tomcat 6 didn't hit Debian's experimental until the moment I am typing this.

The installation of Tomcat 5.5 and Solr 1.2 from APT is as easy as:

# apt-get install solr-tomcat5.5

The problem for me is: Tomcat 5.5 is way old and caused me few issues with relatively bug updates to Solr. So I wanted to install Tomcat 6 which will be done with these steps:

# cd
# apt-get install sun-java6-jdk
# wget http://apache.osuosl.org/tomcat/tomcat-6/v6.0.18/bin/apache-tomcat-6.0.1...
# tar zxf apache-tomcat-6.0.18.tar.gz

Lucene is a very nice, robust and flexible search engine. The ways you can benefit from Lucene varies from small library system to a large e-commerce portal. To unleash Lucene, you either have to use Lucene ported to your favorite language or install Solr and let Solr handle communication with Lucene. Here we are going to install Solr on a Gentoo Linux box with Tomcat as the servlet container. To get started, install Tomcat using: # emerge tomcat Default Tomcat configuration reserves the port 8080 for Tomcat which is fine unless you have another service running on that port. Now let's download Solr: ~ $ mkdir solr ~ $ cd solr

I thought this may help VI/VIM fans.

After getting my first computer, I was really unhappy with the result of my first attempt to install Linux. And after some retries with this piece of hardware I just wanted to share you what I came through: First thing I have to do is to thank Wakady for his comment since without it I would have stayed for long trying with FreeBSD. Now let's give you some real stuff. I installed openSUSE 10.2, FreeBSD 6.2 -RELEASE and Ubunutu 6.10 (Edgy Eft) on this machine and came with different results and I think they deserve sharing. You will find the first two attempts in older posts so I will go directly to the third one:

After the big failure I had with installing openSUSE on my dear laptop. I deceided to abandon the whole Linux and use BSD. Installing FreeBSD was fun to watch, since I didn't do that myself. Anyways FreeBSD booted fine, things were going a little bit slow but they went. Then came the disaster: Intel PRO/Wireless 3945ABG isn't yet supported by the latest FreeBSD which is 6.2 right now.

Last week, I finally bought my first PC since I entered the computer era. I went for a HP Pavilion dv6183ea which sports a gigantic Intel Centrino Duo 2 running at 1.83GHz, a nVidia GeForce Go 7400 with 256MBs of RAM, etc [read full specification at HP] As a Linux fan, a newbie though, I deceided to install Linux. In the meantime, our company's system admin and I prefers openSUSE so that's what I went for.

Installing SugarCRM 4.5 OS on my SuSE 10.1 was clean and nice as expected. It was just the php-json module, which SugarCRM installer stated it's optional, made SugarCRM perform very slow and in most cases exceeding execution time and leaking memory. Anyways I wanted to install the JSON module to see how things will go, but unfortunately my dear SuSE 10.1 repositories didn't like it when I made 'smart install php5-json'.

I was doing some very basic stuff with my Apache 2.2 (which is running on my work SuSE 10.1 box): I was creating symbolic links for some folders. Things were supposed to go smooth and fine but this didn't happen. Instead, Apache refused to follow the symbolic links! I quickly checked /etc/apache2/httpd.conf but everything was fine: Options Indexes FollowSymLinks I craweled Google for an hour but all posts told me I'm not missing anything.

I tried installing Ruby and Rails on Ubuntu 5.10 (Breezy), I followed exactly what was written in the article: http://fo64.com/articles/2005/10/20/rails-on-breezy But I ran into trouble with Rails after the installation, Rails said: "Rails does not work with Ruby version 1.8.3". After some search and a friend's help, it appears that you have to do the following BEFORE you follow what's in the article: