Scala on Ubuntu

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Sep 232007
 

As I am experimenting (not more than that) with the Scala language, I needed to reinstall that in my Ubuntu 64-bits. The repositories only have version 2.3, whereas version 2.6 is already the final (as in: non-beta) version. Ubuntu is a fine OS, but it’s repositories are far from up-to-date (you need to modify your repositories-list to get Thunderbird 2, the regular repositories only have 1.5!).
So I uninstalled the 2.3 version and downloaded the sources. The Scala wiki has excellent instructions on how to build the binaries, so I decided to give it a go. I tried with Java 5 and with Java 6, and to no surprise the Java 6 version was built faster and ran the tests faster. Considerably faster: the Java 5 version ran all tests in 29 minutes, the Java 6 version in 23 minutes, about 20% faster.

As I just installed Oracle 10g (64 bits Linux version) I will try to do some Scala-Oracle tests. We’ll see.

Ubuntu saved the day

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Sep 142007
 

My PC died two days ago. I thought it was the powersupply, but it was the powersupply and the motherboard. I guess one caused the other to break.

I bought new hardware. P4 mobo’s are hard to get nowadays, so I decided to dive into: 64 bits. AMD’s are cheap nowadays, so I bought a Athlon 64 X2 6000+ (dual core, 3GHz each), a motherboard that had AGP (instead of PCI-e), 4GB of memory (4x1GB) and to complete it all: a 500GB SATA harddisk to replace two old, noisy, heat-producing SCSI disks.

Today I assembled the whole shebang. Whilst putting together the system, I was still in doubt whether I would install Solaris 10 64bits or Ubuntu Feisty 64bits. I like Ubuntu very much, but Sun has tons of experience in 64bits. And I like Solaris.

Not knowing what to expect when powering up the system, I could never have guessed I was in for a very very pleasant surprise. Not only did I get the normal Grub prompt, no, the system completely booted into my existing Ubuntu. Of course the devices in fstab had to be renamed, but that was it. Sound does not work, but that’s because I did not reinstall the soundcard (since the mobo has onboard 7.1 sound).

So here I am. Basically with a complete new system and my OS still runs as always. Are you paying attention, Mr. Gates?

Of course I still need to install Solaris/Ubuntu 64-bits, to use the new hardware to its extends. But that’s an exercise for later.

So whatever these socalled experts say about all the Ubuntu-blogging out there, trust me: Ubuntu rocks big time!

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