A short aside

2011-Dec-15, Thursday 02:50 pm
[personal profile] chebe
Half the screen on my laptop is broken, and at six years of age the insurance has expired. This means a momentous event is about to occur, the New Laptop. And I'm getting all excited. It's coming with Windows 7 (which I haven't tried yet), so I think I'm going to have to dual-boot it with linux. Probably Fedora, but I'll have to try a Live CD first to see if the USB problems I went through are hardware/driver specific. I have an existing Windows XP VM I'll probably set up under linux too. And I'm thinking of setting up a lamp stack on CentOS to play around with WordPress. Which means I might have use of the IE-testing VMs Microsoft made up. Also a full Eclipse set-up for Android development might be fun. Then there's also the software/IDEs for my music player and xBees that are Windows-only. Can I set-up my VMs in a third partition and have them happily accessed from either OS? That'd be neat. And a media partition too, which I could set up with rsync to external backup. Am I going to need software version control, if for nothing else then Arduino code? If so, which one? ... Maybe this is all just overkill. Then again, I am a computer geek ;) Oh the things I'm going to learn!

Date: 2011-12-15 05:56 pm (UTC)
From: [personal profile] vatine
You probably want SOME sort of version control. What that is/would be... Try to stay away from CVS, it's old and has some interesting misfeatures.

Git MAY be the thing to choose. It's distributed, can do ad-hoc structures, pulling and pushing updates in all sorts of directions. It has network support and there's at leats a few "cloud-based" places to stash off-home copies of your source tree(s).

But, I'd advise doing at least a little bit of comparisons between Git, Subversion and Mercurial before you decide on which one you go with. And there's always the option of using more than one.

Date: 2011-12-16 06:53 am (UTC)
From: [personal profile] vatine
Research rocks. I don't think emulating me is necessarily the BEST idea ever, since I use at least two different VCs at home and none of those at work. It's even to the point that for one of my spare-time computer-mediated hobbies, I use versioned tar-balls for archiving purposes (but, then, the archived data is "LaTeX source, DVI, PDF, HTML and plain text" and only three of those go well in a classic text-based VC system).

Date: 2011-12-16 10:14 pm (UTC)
From: [personal profile] vatine
I found myself arguing against a shell-script construct today, because it has only been supported since the early 80s. But to my defense, I only mildly argued against it (in a "this is equivalent functionally, shorter AND works further into the past"). Yeah, old-school has its place. :)

Date: 2011-12-16 01:44 pm (UTC)
From: [personal profile] floatboth
Mercurial is less popular, slower, but a little easier (commands are more specific, eg. git checkout == hg branch & update & revert). Read this: http://stevelosh.com/blog/2010/01/the-real-difference-between-mercurial-and-git/

And use git. Just because of GitHub. Or use Mercurial with GitHub. http://hg-git.github.com/

Also, IE VMs? http://browserling.com

Date: 2011-12-16 02:18 pm (UTC)
From: [personal profile] floatboth
Decent usage == private repos?

If you want to keep it on your machine, you don't need any server at all. You can push to BitBucket (unlimited private repos!) instead of GitHub for backing up, but GitHub is really great for open source projects.

And you can use Browserling for free, 5 minutes per session.

Date: 2011-12-16 03:02 pm (UTC)
From: [personal profile] floatboth
So you're working on something that's not open source and not for profit… just curious what it is :-)

Date: 2011-12-15 06:39 pm (UTC)
From: [personal profile] altamira16
Why would you do both dual boot and have virtual machines? It seemed like more people are leaving dual boot in favor of virtual machines. I have a Mac, and I use Parallels to run Windows in a virtual machine on it. Why would you want a third partition for your virtual machines?