ASD M210 - now sees the net!

Last Saturday I picked up an apparently unused ASD M210. Its a barcode reader with Win CE, a touch screen and a dock.
I tried for hours to get the wifi working but no luck. Some third party wifi software that just doesn't seem to want to radio. Maybe I need to open this thing up and flip a DIP switch or something. Maybe email ASD?
So I tried parking it on its dock, doing a soft reset and Voila, it can see the internet. I also got the barcode to keyboard function to work. Now I'm quite looking forward to getting it to work with Koha.
But Windows CE? Version 5 and no native Wifi? What's up with that?

Moodle!

One of the guys at Cert IV training mentioned Moodle to me. Its a GNU licensed CMS (course management system) which can be used just to administer training attendence, or also to deliver electronic content. According to the website, it even It even has a secondlife plugin (sloodle).

I installed moodle on my dev box (easy) and then on my website (easy once I figured out how the mysql username really worked).

Next step is to install sloodle and see if I can get it connected to Angelmark Bridge in SL.

Versioning, permissions and the development environment

Right now I have only one environment on my development machine, and one environment online at my hosting service. What I really need to do is have some kind of versioning control (CVS or similar) but I can't face another learning curve right now.

I'm going to try something very simple for the permissions and see how that goes. I don't want some kind of shell script between coding and testing and deployment.

Installing LAMP Server

When I tried running PHPinfo, I got a Fatal error: Call to undefined function mysql_connect() error. I found some instructions here which appeared to address this problem, but they seemed to generic to be a quick answer to my problem.

So following the instructions , I installed the LAMP stack all in one hit with the following command:

sudo tasksel install lamp-server

I was still getting the following error, but at least I was getting some progress.

Warning: mysql_connect() function.mysql-connect: Access denied for user 'root'@'localhost' (using password: NO) in /var/www/phpinfo.php on line 3
Sorry unable to connect to my sql

This was easily fixed by adding the new password to the test script.

Accessing My Old Database

I copied over my old database files using a simple file copy. It appeared to work. I could query tables, but not update them.

Based on this discussion I tried flushing the tables, but that didn't seem to make a difference, so I chowned and chmoded so the mysql user had full ownership and access to the files and directory.

Installing mysql

Using Synaptic package manager, I installed mysql server. Changed the root password and noted that mysql was now running in Services.

Using add/remove programs, I installed mysql Navigator. I was able to create a test database.

Installing Development tools in my new environment

Using the package manager, I grabbed PHP5. This seemed to also grab several additional Apache components.

I installed Eclipse and the Java Runtime environment using the instructions here. This only got me Eclipse 3.2, which is years old, but I decided to give it a go anyway.

Using the instructions here I installed PHPEclipse. It appeared to install OK, but I got an error when I tried to open a new php file. I changed to "plugin development" perspective and got a list of error messages which I then googled. This lead to this discussion on coderanch:

It looks like what happened here is that your PHP plugin authors did a naughty thing and used an internal class that is not present in the version of Eclipse that you have, so their editor is failing to load. What you need to do is check the documentation or website for the PHP plugin and see if you can figure out what version of Eclipse it works with, then try to find and install that version instead of whatever you have now. You could also report this to them as a bug, if the plugin is still being developed.

and the comment right below it from the person who originally had the issue:

Thankyou very much. I thought the problem was with me. I just down loaded the PDT all in one and I'm de-bugging well.

I did the same thing. I grabbed the pdt all in one archive according to the instructions here. This got me a working PHP IDE. Next step is to make sure the webserver works with PHP.

My new VM development environment

Yesterday I got tired of a development environment on the PC, so I decided to put a Linux machine with a full UI into a Virtual Box VM. I decided on Ubuntu 8.04 because a few things are still "complicated" on 9.

After 3 attempts (is my ISP at fault here?) I downloaded the Ubuntu ISO. I decided on 32 bit - can't see a reason to go 64 bit for this. I attached the ISO to a new Virtualbox with 1G RAM and 128G of HD, then ran the install, which went smothly.

I adjusted a few settings on Virtualbox - switched on processor support for virtualisation, 3d acceleration and nested paging. Then I ran the VM, and updated the package manager. Everything went very smoothly.

The only real complication is the resolution. Natively, the VM only offered 800*600 and 600*480. Not enough for Eclipse and a running window. I found I could get better resolution choices if I installed the Virtualbox Guest Additions. So I followed the instructions here but for some reason my copy of the Virtualbox Guest Additions had 2 different scripts for AMD and Intel, so I used the following process:

1. cd /media/cdrom/
2. sudo sh ./VBoxLinuxAdditions-x86.run
3. Waited for a few minutes and the restarted the Vm
4. Voila! The resolution in the VM now automagically adjusts to the size of my Virtualbox window.

I also added a shared folder so I could see my host directory from the guest. This is currently mounted with the following command:

• sudo mount.vboxsf share ~/share/

Todo: mount it automatically.

This was the basics I needed for the machine. Next step was to install the development tools I needed.