I'm excited to report that my friend Mike, who is a published author and an editor for my writing from a previous position, now has a new Foresight Linux 1.1 install on his old IBM ThinkPad T20. Mike has all Macs in his house currently, so this was his only PC option for Linux. I told him I saw no reason we couldn't get something installed on it, even if it ran slow and the user was forced to limit simultaneous activities.

He pulled the T20 out of his closet, dusted it off, and burned some Foresight install disks. I learned that he had purchased it as a refurbished machine back in 2003, so I suppose I shouldn't have been surprised to learn it only had 192 MB of RAM and a Pentium III processor. I didn't realize this was going to limit our install options, though; after the disc failed to boot to the installer, I had Mike bring the T20 to me and we worked together to get it installed.

We determined that our best option, since the discs were continuing to fail, was a network install. I supervised a network install from a shared ISO image. That took about three hours, and the remaining configuration and test run at the end was successful.

We took advantage of the install time, though, as I offered a crash course on basic Linux structure (this was his first time using it), how it compared to Windows with which he was familiar, and the Gnome Desktop Environment. We spent a lot of time talking about the "software appliance" concept, too, and what rPath offered as technologies for building them. Mike picked up everything pretty quickly and was anxious to explore his installed system.

I look forward to helping Mike learn more!

Part of my upcoming documentation efforts is to enhance the rPath Appliance Platform Plugin Development guide. As part of that, I decided to develop plugins for Simple Machines Forum Appliance and Fogawi.

I determined that in the next couple of weeks I may be learning about programming languages and resources I've never used before just for the purpose of developing a couple of plugins. What I decided to do along the way is to document the experience as much as I can so I can remember what things I needed to know and convey as much of that as possible in the developer documentation.

I'm going to start with the SMF configuration portion of the Fogawi rAP plugin, which I will then copy to the SMF project and rework as the SMF rAP plugin.

The first thing I've done is to copy raa-plugin-mediawiki from mediawiki.rpath.org; the project is in development as a new generation of the previous MediaWiki Appliance project, and I was encouraged to use the plugin package as a guide to developing my own.

I checked out the clone of the package and unpacked one of the tar files to review its contents. Starting with the top directory level, I saw a few packages I could modify easily with a text editor, adjusting a few basic informational things to rebrand the plugin files:
LICENSE, README, NEWS, PKG-INFO, and setup.py seem straightforward, but I'm not sure yet what MANIFEST.in and setup.cfg are for just yet.

Now, I'm about to dive in to the directories: rPath and the renamed rap_plugin_fogawi.egg-info. As I go forward, I will attempt to make sense of the structure here and learn what parts do what tasks.

I stepped through some shadowing and cloning today as part of developing some of the reference docs at wiki.rpath.com. After working with my example for a while, I decided to separate out the example as part of a shadowing and cloning tutorial. The tutorial takes the student through: creating a simple script and package recipe, committing to an initial branch, shadowing to a different branch, modifying the shadow, modifying the parent branch, merging updates from a parent to a shadow, cloning to a different branch, and modifying the clone. At each step, there are commands used to verify available and installed versions and to differentiate between packages. The example used is reflective of the currently recommended release management structure.

The resulting tutorial that reflects all the steps I took is published here:
http://wiki.rpath.com/wiki/Tutorial:Shadowing_and_Cloning