soaked and soaped

Yesterday I tried to connect my notebook (running Ubuntu) to the wireless network at my girlfriend’s home — for nothing.
It didn’t work.

The network was secured with WPA and my Ubuntu Edgy was not able to connect to WPA protected networks out of the box.
I knew there is the tool named network manager, but I already tried to work with it some month ago – and I had no positive experience with.

While searching in the Ubuntu forums for a solution I found a new tool called Wicd (spoken: wicked).

With Wicd, your notebook connects to wireless networks at boot and has the ability to connect to most commonly used encryption systems like WEP, WPA 1/2 and a lot more.

Currently it is under heavy development, but it sounds promising and it already works very nice.

The last RadRails version 0.7.2 was released 3 months ago and it seems the RadRails-Team members are spending their time on other things. RadRails isn’t feature complete yet and there are still many bugs bugs waiting to be fixed.

And honestly, I don’t like to work with software, which needs some work but isn’t under maintenance/development any more.

So I (again) took a look at other Rails editors/IDEs to try out. After playing around with vim and emacs I decided to give emacs a try.

Some days ago I read on a news feed that Java SE 6 is ready. I had a look at the Key Features List. One point was Improved desktop performance and integration. So I wondered if RadRails could be faster then it was with Java SE 5.

As I mentioned in my last post, RadRails 0.7.1 now supports Mongrel. So I decided to use Mongrel instead of Webrick for development on my notebook. But it was a bit tricky and took me a bit of googling to get it.

As Joe wrote in his post about installing Mongrel on MacOS X, I’ll describe how to install it on Ubuntu, assuming you already have Ruby and Ruby on Rails up and running.

Because Mongrel is partly written in C/C++ for more performance, you have to install the build-essential package. It will install all needed packages so that you can compile C/C++ applications.

sudo apt-get install build-essential
(You can also use the synaptic package manager to install it, if you prefer a GUI)

You also need the @ ruby1.8-dev@ package. When you try to install Mongrel without this installed, it will complain with this errormessage:
extconf.rb:1:in `require’: no such file to load — mkmf (LoadError)
from extconf.rb:1

Install the package with this command:
sudo apt-get install ruby1.8-dev

Then just use gem to install Mongrel:
sudo gem install mongrel —include-dependencies

Gem will ask you, which version of Mongrel you want to install. Choose the latest ruby verion.
Then you’ll see some output from the C/C++ compiler.


Ok, you’re done! Now you can start the server with mongrel_rails in your Railsapp directory.

NOTE: Even without the build-essential package installed, Mongrel will install and say that installation was successful. But when you try to start the server, you’ll get an error message like this:
** Starting Mongrel listening at 0.0.0.0:3000
/usr/local/ruby-1.8.4/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/mongrel-0.3.13.3/lib/
mongrel.rb:666:in `register’: undefined method `resolve’ for
nil:Mongrel::URIClassifier (NoMethodError)