Wednesday 6 August 2008

Headless VirtualBox in ubuntu server.

1) I tried to get a headless VirtualBox running in the virtualbox which I could apt-get from a standard Ubuntu Hardy repository. - turns out that that version of virtual box does not support headless mode.

2) Then I tried to install a version of virtualbox I downloaded previously from sun (virtualbox_1.6.2-31466_Ubuntu_hardy_i386.deb) but it failed to compile its kernel module, even after I installed the kernel source:
# /etc/init.d/vboxdrv setup
* Stopping VirtualBox kernel module
* done.
* Removing old VirtualBox kernel module
* done.
* Recompiling VirtualBox kernel module
* Look at /var/log/vbox-install.log to find out what went wrong
3) Then I downloaded the latest version from sun, installed it:
# gdebi virtualbox_1.6.4-33808_Ubuntu_hardy_i386.deb
and it worked beautifully!

Friday 1 August 2008

maven repository manager

After struggling for a couple of days, I finally managed to set up a local maven repository behind a proxy.
  • I first tried nexus, but it's configuration is very buggy and despite the fact that it don't work for me, it keeps on forgetting my settings if I open on it again.
  • Then I tried artifactory, ant it too looked promising, but for some reason I could not get it to download stuff through a proxy either. To be fair after I figured out that my real problem as that my maven clean plugin was broken, I managed to get artifactory working through a proxy (but I think I like archiva the most at the moment).
  • Then I tried apache archiva, which looked even more promising since it actually had the concept of a network proxy on its configuration screen. After a lot of googling, I found out that its a known (and fixed but un-released) bug in archiva 1.1. (http://jira.codehaus.org/browse/MRM-884). So I installed version 1.0.2 and my downloads began to work!!
The only problem was that as part of testing if this works, I deleted the org directory in my maven repository (as described in the nexus section of the maven difinitve guide).
This caused my `mvn clean` to stop working:
"org.apache.maven.plugin.version.PluginVersionNotFoundException: The plugin 'org.apache.maven.plugins:maven-clean-plugin' does not exist or no valid version could be found"
After a bit of googling I found out that deleting my repository (~/.m2/repository) fixes this problem!
(http://www.mail-archive.com/users@maven.apache.org/msg68288.html)

A last note is that the different repository mangers are surprisingly similar as to how they work and configured. It must be something to with where they all come from.