May 20, 2007

 

We had a great Birds of a Feather session at RailsConf thanks to all the participatnts. I've posted the slides, along with the source code I used to create them (SlideySlide) elsewhere.

You can read more about it in a post I wrote summarizing some of the discoveries.

There is now a Linux/Ubuntu vesrion of Hackety Hack available. I know how finicky these systems can be, but I have to say this was (by far) the easiest program I have ever installed on Ubuntu. I'm still not quite sure how it got running so fast ... everything just worked as described.

One of the neatest initial things I felt was how familiar HH looked - HH on Ubuntu looks just like the Windows version.

There's something really neat about being able to see the same (Ruby) program behave the same way running on two different OS architectures. It is sort of like having a universal language to communicate with across borders. It was relaxing. Here are the installation directions provided by _why:

 http://hacketyhack.net/get/hacketyhack-0.L.tar.gz

This binary is built on Ubuntu Feisty (i686).  You will need to
supply firefox and wxwindows.

So, on Ubuntu:

 sudo apt-get install libwxgtk2.8-0
 cd hacketyhack-0.L
 LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/lib/firefox:. ./hacketyhack

Within minutes of downloading Hackety Hack, I was running through the lessons and writing my own "Hello World" program. All software should be this easy to install! I hope others find an equally friendly Ubuntu installation.

The other highlight - Dell seems set to introduce their Ubuntu offerings very soon, as they have begun to set the technical stage for what these Ubuntu machines will (technically) look like. I think this is gonna be really exciting.