By hannosch@gmail.com (Hanno Schlichting) from Planet Plone. Published on Nov 20, 2008.
Some people following the developer mailing lists or blogosphere have noticed that Plone trunk has seen quite some interesting changes as of late.
From Planet Plone. Published on Nov 20, 2008.
I'm pleased to announce that Products.Gloworm is now an actual product and available for download from PyPi.
GloWorm is a theme inspection tool for Plone. Click on a part of the Plone interface to see what it is, where it came from, how it was generated, and what TAL statements are acting upon it. Show, hide, move, and customize viewlets through Plone. Get information about Archetypes widgets. See a tree-structured view of all viewlets and viewlet managers active on the page, including those in the html head.
Er, I made a bad assumption about namespaces when I first started the project. Later, when I realized I what the old name implied, I felt a bit of a jerk and changed it to something more reasonable. Any chance we could get a best-practices doc for package naming?
I think every person I talked to at the conference asked the same thing and I'll give the same answer: Sure, when someone writes a product to do that, GloWorm will happily talk to it.
Is there anyone out there that wants to step up and write such a thing? Several of the in-the-know developers I talked to said that the ability is there, it just needs to be tied together and polished. Great! When can you start?
Special thanks to Alex, Alan, and many others for encouragement; Joel for evangelism and suggestions; and Mike and Christian for letting me run with this crazy idea.
From Planet Plone. Published on Nov 20, 2008.
Or at least the monthFrom Planet Plone. Published on Nov 20, 2008.
ONE/Northwest is gearing up for building various “civic engagement features”–things like online fundraising, online advocacy, and event RSVP–on top of Plone and Salesforce.com. (You’ll be hearing more about this.) PloneFormGen will play a significant role in implementing several of these features, so we’ve invited its creator, the illustrious Steve McMahon, to come up to Seattle for a little PloneFormGen mini-sprint at the beginning of December.
As part of planning for this sprint and the future of PloneFormGen development, we’d like to get a sense of which outstanding feature requests are most desired by the community. So if you use PloneFormGen, please take a minute to go to http://ploneformgen.uservoice.com and vote for the improvements that would most ease your life when working with PloneFormGen. (The list is as of this writing heavily influenced by my own sense of what’s important — please feel free to add new items as well.)
Of course, our primary interest during the mini-sprint will be in scratching our own itches, but this may help us choose which of a number of minor itches to scratch if we have time, and I imagine the rating of priorities will come in handy in the future. (This is also a bit of a case study to see how well +/- voting works for prioritizing feature requests, to see if it’s something we should also consider doing for Plone itself.)
From Planet Plone. Published on Nov 19, 2008.
Tune in to watch the conference!From Planet Plone. Published on Nov 19, 2008.
An installable theme for Plone 3.0 that does little but override default public stylesheets with empty ones.From Planet Plone. Published on Nov 19, 2008.
Open Source Content Management Solutions are generating more confidence as companies begin to realise the full potential of such software.By noreply@blogger.com (malthe) from Planet Plone. Published on Nov 19, 2008.
You can now have your cake and eat it, too.
By rok.garbas@gmail.com (Rok Garbas) from Planet Plone. Published on Nov 19, 2008.
i just read hannosh's "News from trunk ..." before going to bed and as a result of this i woke up in the middle of the night (its 2:30am here) to write this blog post. i will just write things that i wish would be in plone4. some of this are unpolished ideas, some of this are just pain that i'm expiriencing.By rok.garbas@gmail.com (Rok Garbas) from Planet Plone. Published on Nov 19, 2008.
i blame hannosch for not to be able to sleep tonight :P (previous post)
From Planet Plone. Published on Nov 18, 2008.
I finally got around to officially releasing the Trac Subversion Location Plugin. This fills a little hole in Trac’s UI wherein there was no easy way to go from spelunking around in the Browse Source tab to actually doing a checkout.
For a live demo, see the WebLion Trac. Enjoy!
From Planet Plone. Published on Nov 18, 2008.
Now you can install EasyShop as easy as every other package:From Planet Plone. Published on Nov 17, 2008.
Information about our Plone Conference 2009 proposals, and how Plone Foundation members can help select the location for Plone Conference 2009.From Planet Plone. Published on Nov 16, 2008.
OK, so I have made up my mind. I’m switching back to Ubuntu. Why is a later post but in short I feel that Ubuntu is a better OS if you are a develope, at least a Python/Plone developer like me. This post is to explain some things about how MacBooks boot, and how to install Ubuntu on a MacBook without having OS X on it as well. Oh, and it’s for whining and ranting as well.
Firstly, you need OS X for your MacBook. OS X is the only OS you can use when updating the firmware of the MacBook, and firmware updates on MacBooks can be very useful. Earlier ones have for example increased the battery life significantly. Those things are nice to have. This means that most people who use Linux as the main OS will dual boot. There are several FAQs out there to do this, so I won’t touch on that. If you want OS X only to update the firmware, you can reinstall OS X on your hard disk skipping everything that is optional, and thus use up as little space as possible. Reportedly it should be possible to have a partition size of 10-15 GB for this. Quite a significant space waster just to keep the firmware updated, admittedly.
However, I want to be able to boot into OS X so that I can test things. Sometimes I get reports that things doesn’t work in Safari, and I quite often gets bug reports on Plone4ArtistsCalendar together with iCal. It’s going to be nice to be able to test those reports myself. So I need more than these 10GB, probably around 40GB. And of course, I need to be able to test websites in Internet Explorer as well. I have done that with a Windows machine I have at home so far, but to be able to do it when I’m at a customers place would be a nice bonus. And of course, there goes another 40GB, and then I suddenly don’t have much space left for Ubuntu. Especially since I want separate root and home partitions (this has saved me once earlier, when an upgrade went pear-shaped).
So, I yesterday bought an external HD. The My Passport Studio has faster transfer rates, so I picked that one, even though it’s MacBook Pro silvery, and not MacBook white. (Wester DIgital has Macbook white external drives too, but only of their cheaper, slower model). Turns out the faster choice was good because it also has Firewire, and I later read that MacBooks won’t reliably boot from USB drives, so that was a lucky choice. I’m hoping this has been changed in the new model MacBooks that doesn’t have Firewire.
Anyway, I then proceeded to try to get Mac OS X onto the external HD (easy) and Ubuntu onto the internal HD. That later part was not so easy. OK, if you let Ubuntu take over the whole HD, by default, it’s going to work, but there will be a long delay for about 30 seconds where the MacBook will seem to not do anything. And if you have an external drive connected or a bootable CD in the drive, it will boot from that, no options. What the heck was going on here?
Well, after many tried, lots of reading on different sites and many retries (today I have installed Mac OS X three times, which takes an hour or more each time, and Ubuntu I think five (maybe more) times, which takes some 15-20 minutes or so, all in efforts to get the right combination of partition tables and software and I don’t know what. And here finally is the explanations.
The MacBook 3,1 and 4,1 will only load from HFS+ partitions. If there are none available, it will sit around for 20-30 seconds while waiting for you to insert one. Yeah, really. Only then will it go on to boot from non-GFS partitions. This is to be honest quite astounding, and completely incomprehensible. It’s yet again one of these “It Just Works (If You Do Exactly What We Tell You To) ™” attitudes from Apple. This means that the primary partition has to be HFS+. Obviously, you can’t install Ubuntu to HFS+. Neither, it seems, can you install GRUB to it. You can of course install OS X on it, which is why this all works if you dualboot, but that takes 10GB of space, see above. But despair not, there is something you can install to an HFS+ partition, which is not a big fat OS and will boot, and it’s called rEFIt. It’s a boot menu for EFI machines, specifically MacBooks. It can be installed on pretty much any filesystem, and since it’s designed to be a multi boot system for MacBooks, it works well in this case. After installation of Ubuntu, rEFIt will see the Ubuntu and you can boot it, without having to wait for half a minute.
Here are the rough steps you need to do (I didn’t do it in this order, as I was experimenting heavily, but this ordet should work, I think). Again, this has been tested on a MacBook 4,1. It seems to NOT be necessary on MacBook swith Intel CoreDuo (1,1 and 2,1). But it seems to be necessary on MacBooks with Core2Duo (3,1, and 4,1. I don’t know about the new 5,1).
This is all and well, and works. The only minor stupidity with this, is that you now have a two-step boot. And to explain why, we must talk about EFI. EFI is the new successor to the BIOS that has been around since the original IBM PC. But of course, not all software that needs to support EFI does that, so therefore there is also a BIOS compatibility mode. EFI also uses a new sort of boot procedure, based on something called GUID Partition Table, or GPT instead of the old MBR one. The booting will revert to MBR if there is no GPT, and in this case it will also enter BIOS compatibility mode (I think).
Now, GRUB is a MBR type loader that uses BIOS compatibility mode. And you have to have it. Because although there is an EFI boot loader from Linux, ELILO, if you boot the machine completely in EFI mode and not in BIOS compatibility mode, you won’t have a BIOS, and lo, the graphics drivers require this, so you can’t run the proper graphics drivers, so graphics performance will suck. And the reason the graphics drivers require this, seems to be that Apple refuse to tell the driver developers how to support the cards without a BIOS.
This sucks, Apple. This, really, really, sucks. I was told that now the MacBook is an open platform where you can run any OS. Well, that is still, unfortunately, bullshit. Apple and their platforms are still not open. Sure, when it comes to the iPhones they have blamed the carriers. I don’t believe that anymore. Help the Linux people write proper ELI drivers for your machines, if you are serious about this. I understand you don’t want OS X running on normal PC’s. You are using OS X as an argument for buying your hardware. If you sold OS X separately your machines would be cheaper and your upgrades more expensive, and that would probably not be good for business. But making it hard to run OTHER things on Macs doesn’t make any sense.
All in all, I can not recommend you to buy MacBooks unless you intend your main OS to be OS X. And I can’t recommend OS X to a developer. Yes, this buy was a mistake.
Posted in linux, mac, plone, python, ubuntu Tagged: ELILO, grub, macbook, rEFIt, single boot
By noreply@blogger.com (Schlepp) from Planet Plone. Published on Nov 16, 2008.
As regular readers of this blog know, 7 Nov. was World Plone Day. If you hosted a WPD event, but haven't sent in your summary results, please go over to the spreadsheet at Google Docs and fill in your data. Thanks in advance.With 66% of the event sites reporting in, the first World Plone Day can claim success. Friday 7 November was World Plone Day, a coordinated worldwide series of meetups, seminars, and workshops. Events were scheduled from Buenos Aires, Argentina to Hanoi, Viet Nam with a healthy representation in North America and Europe. Truly an international day of Plone, 30 countries on five continents were involved.Thanks to everyone for their participation and enthusiasm.
Plone is a ready-to-run, open source content management system that is built on the powerful and free Zope application server. Plone is easy to set up, extremely flexible, and provides you with a system for managing web content that is ideal for project groups, communities, web sites, extranets and intranets.
Forty of the 61 registered venues have reported in, showing a total of 982 participants who listened to 107 presenters. Extrapolating to those sites that have yet to record their guest count, perhaps 1500 participants world wide were engaged in learning about Plone. Over 40 companies sponsored events throughout the globe, which were sanctioned by the not-for-profit Plone Foundation, the legal owner of the Plone codebase, trademarks, and domain names.
Activities ranged from small, informal gatherings with ad hoc presentations to large, formal sessions with a half dozen presentations, refreshments, and door prizes. Brasilia, Brazil had the largest event with 128 attendees. Events were tied together in more than enthusiasm for Plone--live blogging, Twitter, and streaming video were all used to interconnect participants.
World Plone Day is anticipated to become an annual event to advocate the benefits of using Plone in education, government, non-profit/non-governmental organizations, and business. For more information, contact the Plone support lists.
