Ubuntu and Passenger Has Just Married

1 June 2008 ⋅ 1 min read ⋅ linux

Ubuntu

My gosh, I can’t believe I missed this. On May 21 Brightbox has announced a happy marriage of a revolutionary mod_rails (Passenger) project from Phusion to the excellent user-friendly Linux for the mere mortals – Ubuntu.

It means that the deployment and management of Rails applications becomes a breeze. I personally still prefer my very custom deployment setup – Nginx-Mongrel (for Rails) + Nginx-Apache (for PHP), but for those planning to unroll massive Rails hosting, it may be a famous Red Pill.

Love Rails!

Ubuntu 8.04 Is Out

25 April 2008 ⋅ 2 min read ⋅ linux

It was Clean Thursday yesterday and hopefully you were cleaning your hard drive for a great new Ubuntu 8.04. It made it to the download sites in the evening and since then they creak under a heaviest load.

Ubuntu 8.04 is Coming

8 April 2008 ⋅ 2 min read ⋅ linux

Ubuntu 8.10

You know, I’m a big fan of Ubuntu Linux and using it on my aging HP compaq nx9005 laptop for my business needs just fine for more than 5 years now. I’ve been running it since its childhood and my drawers are still full of Live CDs they generously send to everyone free of charge.

Today, when I was looking for an updated Pidgin 2.4.1 package (currently I’m running 2.2.0), I happened to see the front page of the official Ubuntu site and guess what? It struck me on the head. 16 days left until the next release!

It made my day. I’m well-taught that every next release takes so much enjoyment that it would be fair to make it an official world-wide holiday. No kidding. :) It is much like every next Mac OS X version, but without an additional weight. You still can run the OS on your granny’s i386, and do that comfortably. But if you have an up-to-date roaring monster under the hood, there’s a plenty of options to keep it busy.

Enough words. Let’s count out loud.

Backuping troubles

14 December 2005 ⋅ 3 min read ⋅ linux

This Monday I decided to upgrade my system to a newer version of Ubuntu Linux which has just arrived — Ubuntu 5.10 Breezy. In my past, I had hundreds of system upgrades and installations so that I clearly knew what to do.

Packaging Java applications for Ubuntu and other Debian’s

31 August 2005 ⋅ 3 min read ⋅ java linux

As all of you probably know, we are building the BlogBridge application – the next generation of feed aggregators. At the present moment we are distributing the application in two forms: as Java Web Start application and ZIP-packaged Java application available for download from SourceForge.net. Lately, we started to think how to create native installation/uninstallation experience for our users on different platforms. We decided to support native installations for Windows, Mac OS X, generic Tar.GZ archives and Debian packages.

In this tutorial I will share the basics of Debian package creation for Java applications.