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Archive for October, 2008

CentOS 5.2 under Xen

October 16th, 2008 No comments
From Mike Tsao

If the following are true:

  • You have a working Xen Dom0 instance
  • You have downloaded the CentOS 5.2 image from jailtime.org
  • You can’t get the image to boot up as a DomU instance because of missing directories such as /dev and /proc

Then you might be interested in knowing that the jailtime images expect certain Xen modules to be preloaded in the ramdisk. So run something like this on your Dom0:

mkinitrd -v -f --with=ext3 --preload=xenblk --with=xennet /boot/initrd-2.6.18-92.1.6.el5xen-xenblk.img 2.6.18-92.1.6.el5xen

Note that I added “-xenblk” to the ramdisk filename to distinguish it from the standard Dom0 file that came with my distro.

Then put the resulting .img in your ramdisk= field in your Xen config file, and believe it or not, it will work. Here’s my complete .cfg:

kernel = "/boot/vmlinuz-2.6.18-92.1.6.el5xen"
ramdisk = "/boot/initrd-2.6.18-92.1.6.el5xen-xenblk.img"
memory = 256
name = "myxen"
vif = [ 'bridge=xenbr0' ]
disk = ['file:/home/xen/myxen/centos.5-2.img,sda1,w',
'file:/home/xen/myxen/swap.img,sda2,w']
dhcp='dhcp'
root = "/dev/sda1 ro"
extra = '4'

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Codelite: a New C++ IDE

October 9th, 2008 3 comments

I’m always on the prowl for new, better tools, especially for C++ development under Linux. While I’ve used vi for decades, my years spent with Visual Studio have left me wanting more.

I’ve tried several commercial and open source C++ IDEs on Linux, from Borland’s C++Builder to KDevelop and of course Eclipse/CDT and found all less than ideal, either because they were too cumbersome, too general or too awkward. Vi and emacs were stiil my editors of choice.

Then one day I stumbled across Code::Blocks and was immediately impressed. Here was a nice, lightweight IDE specifically targeting C++, with good support for existing makefile projects, mutliple compilers and platforms. I used it regularly for about a year until one day I tried browsing Google’s V8 and failed miserably. That’s when I realized Code::Blocks doesn’t support ctags and its own “tag” engine is broken. Googling turned up references to a C::B search plugin but I couldn’t find any code – guess the project stalled.

In fact the project hadn’t stalled but had instead morphed into a complete C++ IDE: codelite. It’s amazing what Eran and his crew have been able to accomplish. Most of the functionality of Code::Blocks is there plus superb search tools.

If you’re developing in C++ you owe yourself the favor of checking it out:

https://codelite.org

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