Tharaka Devadithya's space: Useful Tips

Fedora Setup

Mon, 25 Dec 2006 23:09:48 GMT

These tips are mainly for installing applications that are not open source. For most of the open source applications, FC package manager, Yum will do the job.

Personal Fedora Core 6 Installation Guide (link)
Sun J2SDK-1.5 on Fedora Core 5 and 6 (FC5 and FC6) (link)

How to make fonts on Fedora Core 6 look like on Microsoft Windows (link)

Doxygen

Sat, 23 Dec 2006 19:18:42 GMT

Main source: http://www.stack.nl/~dimitri/doxygen/manual.html

Create a configuration file

doxygen -g <config-file>

If <config-file> is not given, the default is Doxyfile.

The generated file has configuration parameters. Most of them have comments and are self explanatory. Some parameters that need to be modified are,

PROJECT_NAME
OUTPUT_DIRECTORY
REPEAT_BRIEF
- If YES, prepends the brief description of a member or function before the detailed description.
EXTRACT_ALL
- If YES, all entities in the documentation are documented, even if no documentation was available.
- Warnings about undocumented members will not be generated as long as this is set to YES.
INPUT
- List of directories containing source files.
- If left blank, the current directory will be used.
RECURSIVE
- If YES, processes sub-directories recursively.
SOURCE_BROWSER
- If YES, generates cross-reference a (documented) entity with its definition in the source files.
GENERATE_HTML, GENERATE_LATEX

Most of the others can be left with their default values.

Examples of documeting the code can be found at, http://www.stack.nl/~dimitri/doxygen/docblocks.html.

Running doxygen

doxygen <config-file>

SVN

Sun, 22 Oct 2006 02:19:34 GMT

Import existing project to new repository

Assumption: each project has its own repository. This is so that each project has its own revision numbering.
Create a new repository:

svnadmin create --fs-type fsfs /path/to/repos

Subversion book recommends having the folder structure as branches, tags, trunk in its 'A Quick Start'. I.e. all project files in trunk while branches and tags directories are empty.

/tmp/myproject/branches/
/tmp/myproject/tags/
/tmp/myproject/trunk/
foo.c
bar.c
Makefile

Import the existing code (remove binaries before this step):

svn import /tmp/myproject file:///path/to/repos/myproject -m 'Initial import'

Checkout:

svn checkout file:///path/to/repos/myproject/trunk myproject

Or
svn checkout svn+ssh://hostname/path/to/repos/myproject/trunk myproject

Tagging:
svn copy svn+ssh://hostname/path/to/repos/myproject/trunk svn+ssh://hostname/path/to/repos/myproject/tags/release-1.0 -m "Tagging the 1.0 release of myproject"

Differences from CVS

Separate commands to
1. check status of working copy - svn status
2. update working copy with repository - svn update
In CVS, cvs update would do both the above.

MySQL

Thu, 28 Sep 2006 11:15:36 GMT

Installing MySQL as a non-privileged user

The installation instructions as root are pretty straightforward in the official documentation. However for non-roots, lot of details are missing there. Some useful information can be found here.

Some of the steps I followed with a source distribution are shown below:

configure
CFLAGS="-O3 -mpentiumpro" CXX=gcc CXXFLAGS="-O3 -mpentiumpro -felide-constructors -fno-exceptions -fno-rtti" ./configure --prefix=$INSTDIR/mysql-5.0 --localstatedir=$INSTDIR/mysql/data --with-unix-socket-path=$INSTDIR/mysql/tmp/mysql.sock --enable-assembler --with-mysqld-ldflags=-all-static
Notes:
1. Not all programs in MySQL are affected by these parameters. For those that are not affected, command line parameters must be used.
2. If embedded server functionality is required, then use --with-embedded-server flag when running configure.
Initialize server
$INSTDIR/mysql-5.0/bin/mysql_install_db --ldata=$INSTDIR/mysql/data
Start server
$INSTDIR/mysql-5.0/bin/mysqld_safe --datadir=$INSTDIR/mysql/data --pid-file=$INSTDIR/mysql/tmp/mysql.pid --socket=$INSTDIR/mysql/tmp/mysql.sock &
Verify the server is running
$INSTDIR/mysql-5.0/bin/mysqladmin version
$INSTDIR/mysql-5.0/bin/mysqladmin variables
Shut down the server
$INSTDIR/mysql-5.0/bin/mysqladmin -u root shutdown

Notes: Most of the arguments are needed to override options in /etc/my.cnf (assuming there is another version of MySQL installed by a root). Some of the options can be include in an options file, so that it is not required to specify them as command line parameters. More information can be found here.

Installing as root on Fedora Core

Binary RPM seems to be the most convenient.

rpm -ivh MySQL-server-VERSION.ARCH.rpm
rpm -ivh MySQL-client-VERSION.ARCH.rpm
rpm -ivh MySQL-devel-VERSION.ARCH.rpm

This runs the following as well.

mysql_install_db
/bin/sh /usr/bin/mysqld_safe --datadir=/var/lib/mysql --pid-file=/var/lib/mysql/.pid

An alternative is to install from source.
Some useful information can be found here.

If installed with yum, the group permissions for mysql db and related tables (/var/lib/mysql/mysql/) are set incorrectly as root:root. It should be modified as mysql:root. Anyway, this approach seems to be pretty messy and should be attempted only if one has nothing to do for the next 24-48 hours!

Basic usage

Connect: mysql -h host -u user -p
Disconnect: quit
List of DBs: show databases;
Create DB: create database db_name;
Delete DB: drop database db_name;
Export DB: mysqldump -u username -ppassword database_name > backup.sql
Import DB: mysql -u username -ppassword database_name < backup.sql

Other links
Change passwords
Add a new user
C API