The problem is that /dev/hda3 is not available (that is, your IDE internal hard disk) and of course, Xubuntu does not know what to do in that case. Kind of incredible, huh?

Well, the solution for that problem was in this answer of the Ubuntu Forums. Just follow the instructions there and you’ll succeed. Now I have a nice Xubuntu install in my good old and faithful G3 iBook (in double boot with Mac OS X “Jaguar”).

JUCE (Jules’ Utility Class Extensions) is an all-encompassing C++ class library for developing cross-platform applications. It’s particularly good for creating highly-specialised user interfaces and for handling graphics and sound.

For Mac OS X (with the Developer Tools installed) and Windows (using Visual Studio 6, 2003 or 2005), the library builds out-of the box (well, almost: on Windows you need to have QuickTime and the ASIO SDK installed). However, for Linux there are a couple of external dependencies.

This is a small tutorial (and a reminder for myself, as usual) for those interested in building JUCE on Kubuntu 7.10 “Gutsy Gibbon” (these instructions should also be useful for other Linux distributions, but I cannot tell for sure).

1. Make sure that you have the Lua programming language installed (you can use your favorite package manager to install it)
2. Make sure that you have the following libraries installed in your Kubuntu installation using Synaptic or any other package manager (info taken from this JUCE forum post):
   • libx11-dev
   • libasound2-dev
   • libfreetype6-dev
   • libxinerama-dev
   • libglu1-mesa-dev
   • libglut3-dev (with its dependency freeglut3-dev too)
3. Download JUCE 1.45 from Sourceforge
4. Download premake from Sourceforge; unzip the file and install the binary where you want (typically /usr/bin). You have to do this manually, since premake is not available through the Synaptic package manager, in any repository.
5. Unzip the JUCE distribution anywhere (for example in your ~/Desktop) and cd into the juce/build/linux folder.
6. Run “sh runpremake” which will use premake and Lua to create a makefile
7. Run “make” (which is equal to “make CONFIG=Debug”) or “make CONFIG=Release” to build the library; a couple of minutes later you’ll have a juce/bin/libjuce_debug.a file ready to use
8. Optional: You can build some sample applications that use JUCE:
   • juce/extras/juce demo/
   • juce/extras/the jucer/

Hope this helps!

This is arguably the hottest tech news event of the week (but rumor has it that we ain’t seen nothin’ yet)

Today I’ve compiled my own kernel from scratch, thanks to the instructions given in the Ubuntu forums. And I feel like I’ve done another nice, big, useful step in my career. I can only thank all of those who write how-tos and instructions in forums, which is one of the factors that make Linux so great; you can find information about how to do pretty much anything, with incredible levels of detail. I hope that my small contributions might be useful to others! This, for me, is a way to give back to the community as well.

• wxWidgets
• SQLite
• CppUnit
• Doxygen
• Eclipse
• Visual Studio
• Xcode
• ISO C++

The final result is a small utility that you can use to store birthdays for people you know and care about. You can add as many people as you wish, and for each person, as many dates as needed. It has a layered architecture, in such a way that the underlying “business” classes (namely Person and Date) are reusable in another application (my idea was to add a command line app to show this, but I will do it in a later step). The code is portable, and was tested with 3 different compilers (3 GCC versions, and Microsoft’s Visual Studio .NET 2004 one).

Here’s a screenshot of BirthdayCard, running on Mac OS X Tiger:

There are more screenshots in the corresponding page.

I have provided binaries for Mac and Ubuntu (only PowerPC binaries, sorry) and Windows. There is a bundled SQLite database file that contains 950 people, and 2 dates for each person. All in all, it took me 2 weeks to develop the thing, mostly on evenings and weekends.

I have placed the code in the public domain, so that everyone can use it and do what they want with it. The project can be opened with several IDEs, and the code is completely documented for your reading pleasure. Feel free to use this as a template for your own wxWidgets applications, and as always, I am not responsible of anything that could happen while using this software! Use it under your own responsibility, learn & teach, and be kind to each other.

In a future article I will post more comments about what I’ve learnt while creating BirthdayCard.

As I said, it usually works. Particularly for Java, the installation via Synaptic Package Manager does not work, since Sun does not provide Java, in any version, for the Linux/PowerPC platform (there is a Java version for Linux, but it targets the x86 architecture). And since Java is not an open source project (yet), it becomes harder to know what to do.

So this is where this page comes in: it provides all the information needed to install Java in a PowerPC-based Mac, from the 603 to the G5. It even provides the instructions to configure Firefox, Mozilla and Opera to use your newly installed Java installation properly!

The problems I had with following those instructions in my PowerPC G3 iBook were:

1. I could not have the Trash icon working in the panels
2. The “Thunar” version that kept appearing was version 0.3, not the latest 0.4.

As such, I rebuilt Thunar following these instructions, and then I applied this quick fix found here:

• cd /usr/bin
• sudo mv Thunar Thunar.backup
• sudo mv thunar thunar.backup
• sudo ln -s /usr/local/bin/Thunar Thunar
• sudo ln -s Thunar thunar

This did it! I now have the latest version of Xfce and Thunar running in my computer.

There are several ideas behind this project:

1. Create a command-line application using C++, in such a way that the same source code could be used to create executables for the Mac OS X, Linux and Windows.
2. Have a good suite of unit tests for the different modules of the application, using CppUnit.
3. Give a test drive to Doxygen and “dot“, to generate a full CHM file plenty of diagrams and explanations about the solution.
4. Create the application using as many IDEs as possible:
• Eclipse
• Visual Studio (6.0, .NET 2003 and Express 2005)
• Apple Project Builder
• Apple Xcode
5. Compile the application using the biggest possible number of compilers:
• Borland’s free command line tools
• Microsoft (3 different versions)
• GCC (under Windows, Mac OS X and Linux)
6. Learn the basic syntax of makefiles and provide one for each target platform (the Windows version uses MinGW)
7. Make the source code available as “Public Domain” for others to test it, and play with it.

I have learnt several things doing this:

• For some reason, dynamic libraries on the Mac have the “dylib” extension, while in Linux they are “so” files (“shared objects”). They are the equivalent of DLLs in Windows. Other than the naming different, they are used almost the same way.
• Eclipse is a great thing; I could open the project without problem in the three environments.
• Microsoft compilers generate much, much smaller executables than GCC; I would really know why!
• CppUnit works like a charm in all possible environments, exactly as I wanted.
• C++ is an incredible language. I just use 0.1% of what it can do, but I really liked it.
• Doxygen is something out of this planet.

Feel free to download it and tell me your thoughts about it!

My latest discovery is Xubuntu. It is basically the same as Ubuntu and Kubuntu, but with the Xfce desktop instead or GNOME or KDE. The nice thing is that I have not had to uninstall Ubuntu: I just typed “sudo apt-get install xubuntu-desktop” at the command prompt, and 10 minutes later I logged into Xubuntu.

The net result is a sooooooo much faster user experience.

The main machine where I have Xubuntu installed is a rather old G3 iBook that I bought in 2002, with only 256 MB of RAM and 30 GB of hard disk. The machine runs like a charm, but of course with GNOME and KDE there’s a lot of swapping. As soon as I installed the Xfce desktop, things went really faster. I can only recommend using Xubuntu in old machines: the base system only takes 90 MB of RAM, and applications load faster than in GNOME or KDE.

I just love (X)(K)(Ed)Ubuntu :)