A lot has been happening in the mean time! Centos 6 is here! Plus we’ve got an update to Centos 5, not to mention several iterations of Qt. So I have my work cut out for me!

Here is what I plan to do. First, the existing yum tree for software.freivald.com really kind of sucks. I’m going to set up a new tree that compartmentalizes things better. Then I’ll push an update to the software.freivald.com-repo package that will point to the new repository. That way, everyone should have a quick, easy migration to the new tree without having to do anything but your standard ‘yum update’.

The new tree will be renamed to el5 instead of centos because we have a lot of RHEL users as well, and I don’t want them to feel left out. It will also support multiple versions of the OS, from the current supported releases all the way through 6, in one tree. This should make it easy for users to find stuff, and minimize my work load to support all of the platforms in the long-term.

As for you loyal ALIX users, part of generating the new repository will involve setting up new virtual machines for each supported version. During that process I plan to set up the new Alix images, both for Centos 5 and 6. I’ll make improvements to the images based on the comments that I’ve received, and then push them to the web. As you already know, image updates are a manual process.

Once that’s all done, I plan to find a better content management system and change from a wordpress blog into more of a kind of support-site type thingy so that Qt users don’t have to wade through ALIX stuff, so that I can add new items without causing the old ones to scroll of the screen, and so that I can maintain static link addresses for various types of stuff (i.e: joseph.freivald.com/qt would always go to the Qt page, etc.), which will help your favorite search engine find stuff easier. I would appreciate suggestions here, as I find web-based stuff tedious and annoying. In fact, if someone wanted to give back some time to me and help me get a new site configured, I would be really, really appreciative.

Well that’s pretty much it. If anyone is stopping by the Offutt Airforce Base Air-Show on Saturday, stop by the US Coast Guard Academy booth and see me!

Cheers.

–JATF

When Centos 6 is released I’ll be building Qt packages and ALIX images for it but I will not be abandoning el5 until it is EOL. Lord thank you for Virtual Machines!

I will also be re-configuring the repositories to make them non-centos specific.  I’ll be using ‘qt-el’ instead of ‘centos’ to eliminate confusion for RHEL users who have never heard of Centos. The update will involve moving the RPM packages to a new directory structure and updating the repository package.  The old /centos directories will have only the updated repository package in it, so when a ‘yum upgrade’ is performed on an existing machine the new package will redirect the machine to the new directory structure.  A second  ‘yum update’ will then upgrade the packages normally.

With any luck it will be entirely seamless to the community.

On a side note, we’re over 200 registered users, over 700,000 non-bot hits per month (over 670k from Yum and wget alone!), and easily keeping over 50GB of transfer per month, with a peak in October of over 110GB.  We’re #1 on Google’s search with “Qt Centos” and “ALIX Centos” and several others.  We have users in Russia, Germany, Italy, France, India, South Africa, the U.S., and dozens more, with hits coming from .com, .edu, .org and several other top-level domains.

Thank you to everyone for making this project worthwhile.

–JATF

UPDATE [6 OCT, 11:34]: This morning I finally added Yum groups to the repository, so all you have to do for the base library is (as root):
yum groupinstall Qt4
and for the development environment:
yum groupinstall Qt4-Devel
The mysql and postgresql packages do not install by default because they pull a bunch of extra libraries if you don’t have the databases already installed, so you might also want to include:
yum install qt4-postgresql qt4-mysql

If you are doing any application debugging you may want to install qt4-debuginfo as well:
yum install --enablerepo software.freivald.com-debuginfo qt4-debuginfo

NOTE: I’ve changed the 32 bit packages to be optimized for i686, which might register conflicts against the old i386 packages. If that happens, uninstall the conflicting i386 packages using ‘rpm -e –nodeps ‘, which will keep dependencies from preventing the uninstall. Then install the new packages as normal.

If this causes too much headache then I can create a separate repository for each. Let me know.

These packges were created on Centos 5.5 but should be completely compatible with RedHat Enterprise Linux 5.5.

–JATF

The Qt4 packages for Centos are updated to 4.6.2 and Qt Creator is updated to 1.3.1.

To install:

rpm -ivh http://software.freivald.com/el/5/i386/os/software.freivald.com-2.0.0-0.el.noarch.rpm

yum update fontconfig fontconfig-devel qt4 qt4-devel qt4-doc qt4-postgresql qt4-odbc qt4-sqlite qt-creator

Verify that the versions are coming from software.freivald.com and enjoy.

The dichotomy is clear: Quality vs. Portability.

So like everything else that takes for ever and is tedious, I wrote a script.  This one looks in the underlying tree and checks to see if each NEF file has a corresponding JPEG file.  If it doesn’t, then it creates one using ImageMagick.  If there is one, it ignores the file and moves on to the next one. Now she can have the super-high quality RAW pictures, and I can e-mail them to grandma.  Once again, everyone is happy in Joeland.

In this case we also convert the size of the image to two megapixels, which is plenty for sharing photos, but not great for printing blow-ups.  But that’s okay, because we still have the original NEF to manipulate if we want to!

On Centos I had to do a ‘cpan install autodie’ and ‘cpan install IPC::System::Simple’ to get this to compile right.  Autodie is nice because if you hit Ctrl-C to stop the script then it will actually stop instead of continuing on to the next picture.

Here is the script:

#!/usr/bin/perl

use autodie qw(:all);

@FILES = split(/\n/, `find . | grep "\.NEF\$"`);
foreach $file(@FILES) {
    $rawfile = $file;
    $file =~ s/NEF$/small.JPG/;
    if (-d $file) {
        print "Entering directory $file.\n";
    } elsif (! -f $file) {
        print "\t$rawfile -> $file\n";
        system("convert \"$rawfile\" -normalize -resize \"\@2000000\" \"$file\"");
    } else {
        print "\t$rawfile skipped.  $file already exists.\n";
    }
}

Enjoy!

--JATF