VMWare installed

Okay, now I feel good. I’ve got VMWare installed with Windows XP as the guest OS. That means Office and who knows how many other apps are readily accessible for me. REBOL, for starters. It’s supposed to be cross-platform, but REBOL is happiest by far under Windows.

Incidental anecdotal comment: Windows XP running with 512 MB of RAM in a virtual machine is still significantly snappier than a “real” install of Vista and 2 GB of RAM. And I had turned most of the Vista eye candy off before getting fed up and installing Fedora.

Maruku

I just came across Maruku, a Markdown Extra library for Ruby. It’s time to reevaluate my site generation tools. Maybe Maruku could fit into a mutant ZenWeb implementation.

xcb_xlib_unlock issues – Java on Fedora

I decided to install the Sun JDK on my new Fedora install today. Tried downloading the JDK/NetBeans self-installing bundle. It didn’t work. I got an error in xcb_xlib:xcb_xlib_unlock – something about a failed assertion. While running the installer. Drat.

Installation required skipping the Netbeans IDE and just using the self-extracting JDK archive. Then, in order to get Swing to work, I had to remove Xinerama references from any copy of libmawt.so that was in my Java install. There’s a sed script floating out there, but that wasn’t working for me. Before I spent effort figuring out sed, I edited the files from vim.

[brian@localhost ~]$ sudo vim /opt/jdk1.6.0_03/jre/lib/i386/xawt/libmawt.so
[brian@localhost ~]$ sudo vim /opt/jdk1.6.0_03/jre/lib/i386/motif21/libmawt.so
[brian@localhost ~]$ sudo vim /opt/jdk1.6.0_03/jre/lib/i386/headless/libmawt.so
[brian@localhost ~]$

In each case I executed a simple regex

:%s/XINERAMA/FAKEEXT/g

It’s the same as the sed script. I was too lazy to fix a short script that I will probably only use once.

Java’s happy now, so I’m going to go do a little coding.