Monday, May 29, 2006

UPDATE!!!!

I'm back after about more than three months! My studies kept me away from most of my enthusiastic activities including blogging. (but I always managed to read other's blogs) I post this, not because it is over, still I'm in the middle of it, to tell you that I'm still alive :-)

Apart from my studies (its a two year MBA), following things kept me busy all the time. I'll post separate entries for each one when I take my mind out of the busy schedule.

1. We were asked to statndardise our software development process introducing version controlling, process tracking, project management, code tesing etc. We thought of trying open source products rather than pumping money on commecial products. I saw CVS has been used by many people to keep the different versions of codes in a repositary. When I was meddling with it, I found a better one called subversion (SVN). I tested it in the windows environment but the results were poor. Then I turned towards Ubuntu (my personal preference) Linux and it was very successfull. Installing and confuguring (i'll post a separate blog entry on this later) svn was really enjoying and it bahave as it is intended to be.

2. Then we wanted to have a project management system and immediately we found that "trac" is a good option. Not only it integrate with svn but also it has other advantages like fully web based, has wiki facility and bug ticket issuing feature. It also get installed without much trouble. (I'll post the steps later)

3. All these (svn and trac) were installed in a temporary machine which was the only one I could find. The specs of the machine are not that appealing, it's a PIII 500MHz, 128MB machine but thanks to Ubuntu, everything went smoothly. All of a sudden we got new PCs, PIV 3GHz with HT, 1GB RAM, 80 GB SATA HD and luckily, I could reserve one PC as a permanent server. We've got one server but got so many requirements. We should have a SQL Server, Apache Tomcat, svn, trac, and many more to come. SQL Server must be running on windows platform and svn & trac must be run on linux. We've got one PC. The only solution I had was to go for PC virtualization. I installed Vmware on top of windows 2003 Server host and installed Ubuntu as a guest. I managed to transfer all the repositories from the previous PC to the new server. (I hope to post a blog entry on this as well). Installation of guest OSs didn't stop there. I installed XP with office 2007 beta, Ubuntu Dapper Drake (ver 6.06) RC. When all these guest OSs are running, the performance degraded a liitle bit but thanks to Hyper Threading, processor managed to keep it in acceptable level.