Meeting Notes April 4 2006
1. Trouble shooting X.
2. Central Repositories for code.
3. Managing startup scripts through Yast
4. Compiliers
5. Dos2Unix
1. Someone had a problem with X on a laptop with SUSE running.
Some basic trouble shooting methods for getting X working were discussed.
One ideas was to load Knoppix to see if the the latest version of Knoppix would get the X server running properly. Another idea was to compare a working XFREE86 config with the one not working. Another place to find errors is look in the log file for X which is in the directory /var/log/XFREE86.0.log.
2. Central Repositories for both code and documents were discussed.
The newest central repostitory application is called xhref=”http://subversion.tigris.org/”> subversion . Subversion is attempting to replace CVS. However, CVS and subversion are centralized models for development. Some people like decentralized repository. git, hg, and tla are examples of decentralized respositories used for the kernel and other applications. Doxygen is one of the favorite centeralized document repositories for generating documentation.
3. Yast allows people to manage everything in SUSE. However, we had some trouble getting it to start the power daemon on the laptop we were playing with.
4. Compiliers
There was some talk about compiliers and how many people in the Open Source community are bumping heads with Windows programmers. Many open source applications are getting ported to winddows now. When they do, windows programmers have been submitting patches for software they think is bad. Since many windows programers do not understand that many Microsoft compilers do not work right, the developers in the open source community have to reject these patches. Additionally, Dave had tested the GCC 4.1 compiliers and noticed that they find errors better. However, he informed us that the new compiliers are unstable and optimized. Thus, if a funtion is not being used in the program the new compilier will optimized the unused function out.
5. Dos2Unix is an application that changes DOS type text files to unix type.
Genernally, DOS adds characters that are not interpreted right under unix. Thus, if a file is created on a windows machine normally it needs to be converted to the Unix format. This conversion of text files is done automatically over ftp also.