Saturday, December 26, 2009

Review: Lenovo S12 Netbook

I recently purchased a Lenovo S12 Netbook mainly for the purpose of running Ubuntu to do Google Web Toolkit programming. Recently I've had some frustration with Java programming for GWT on my MacBook Pro.

My first impression of the S12 was not a good one. It came with a Windows 7 installation that seeming incredibly bogged down by bloat-ware. On the first startup I felt as if I was being barraged right and let by popups and offers and configuration options. Yikes. The first thing I did was to perform a clean install of Windows 7 from a USB flash drive. This went rather flawlessly and subsequently I installed the Ubuntu 9.10 netbook remix which also was straightforward.

Ubuntu 9.10 did not run well at all until I was able to install the NVidia drivers from the unsupported drivers utility. Using the same utility I also installed the WiFi driver. So far, these are the only two drivers I've worked with. I would recommend having your netbook plugged into an ethernet port if possible when installing Ubuntu.

Moving on to setup of the development environment, nothing could be easier than letting the package manager do all of the work of downloading and installing everything I needed. I let the package manager install the basic Eclipse but then replaced it with the Java EE package from eclipse.org. One problem I have encountered with Eclipse is that there seems to be an issue possibly with the video driver causing the buttons in the GUI to be unresponsive to mouse clicks.

I have not yet tackled getting the onboard camera to function.

Overall I'm very happy with the machine and have no idea how anyone can function without a clean install of Windows 7 or another OS. It is too bad that Lenovo chooses to trash the experience.

Wednesday, December 23, 2009

hbm2ddl and MySQL

Previously I had a post on using hbm2ddl with Maven and the hibernate3-maven-plugin for Maven. I recently needed to use this setup on MySQL so I have posted my persistence.xml below as a reference.


xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
xsi:schemaLocation="http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/persistence
http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/persistence/persistence_1_0.xsd"
version="1.0">


org.hibernate.ejb.HibernatePersistence











Monday, December 14, 2009

Building gwt-presenter and gwt-dispatch on OS X Leopard

I had been having quite a bit of trouble building and running applications that use gwt-presenter, gwt-dispatch and Google GIN on Leopard 10.5.8 recently. The problem comes from the fact that there is no 32 bits JDK6 available. Upgrading to Snow Leopard would of course fix the issue but here are some steps I've taken to compile and run in GWT hosted mode successfully:

- download gwt-presenter and gwt-dispatch locally
- set the active JDK to JDK6 64 bit
- set the build targets in the PM to JDK 1.5
- build jars and install into the local Maven2 repository
- switch the active JDK to JDK5
- build host project
- should run successfully in GWT hosted browser

Wednesday, December 2, 2009

Running GWT 1.7.1 on Ubuntu 9.10 64 bit

I moved my GWT development environment over to Ubuntu 9.10 64 bit after encountering several problems on OS X. The first hurdle on Ubuntu was this one when running the hosted mode browser. The problem was with a missing .so. This posting helped me solve the issue:

http://hsmak.wordpress.com/2009/12/01/how-to-fix-libstdc5-dependency-problem-in-ubuntu-9-10/

Obtaining Spring 3 Artifacts with Maven

Obtaining Spring 3 Artifacts with Maven: "A recent commentor here ragged, "It's only half of the world that's using Maven", when pointing out it is not obvious how to obtain Spring 3 artifacts with Maven. In this entry, I'll show you how to do this and what the options are. This information will also be integrated into the reference [...]"

Hooray finally. I had so much trouble trying to locate RC2's repository during a recent build and had to give up.