Tracks is a web-based application to help you implement David Allen’s Getting Things Done™ methodology. It was built using Ruby on Rails, and comes with a built-in webserver (WEBrick), so that you can run it on your own computer if you like. It can be run on any platform on which Ruby can be installed, including Mac OS X, Windows XP and Linux. Tracks is Open Source, free and licensed under the GNU GPL.

I have been using tracks for some time now, as it was the best choice I could find for a ToDo software that was simple but also good looking, like some of the commercial applications that are out there. Since recently I had to move my installation to another server, I thought to document it and hopefully this might be useful for other peoples also. The official project docs are a little outdated and don’t take advantage that now debian etch has full support for all the needed dependencies and they can be easily installed from debian repositories (except tracks itself ).

The instructions will show how you can install and run tracks using MySQL and the built-in WEBrick server. You can run trakcs with SQLite/SQLite3 or Postgresql if you prefer, and for this look into the installation.html file that comes with the source. Read the rest of this entry »

snapshot.debian.net/archive is one of the unofficial debian projects that can be very useful if you are looking for old debian packages that have been removed from the official repositories. This post is a short presentation of debian snapshot project and how it can help you find the debian packages you can’t seem to find anywhere else.

Debian contains a huge collection of software packages and in order to keep up with this huge size a debian repository is designed to keep only ONE version of a package. This means that newer versions will remove the old ones from the repository, to keep it clean and as slim as possible. Normally this is not a problem as debian (at least for stable and testing) is known to be quite stable in the package updates and things in general don’t break. Still it can happen that a software package is removed, its functionality changed in a newer version or you just want to install the same packages on more machines.

By default each debian system will keep a local cache of all the packages it downloads and installs. This can be found under /var/cache/apt/archives and if the package you are looking for is there you should just go ahead and use it as it is the fastest way to get it. Still if you regularly clean your cache (apt-get clean) then you will no longer find the packages there either.

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I often want to see what packages I have installed on a debian system. Also I like to see what are the upgrades available. This can be achieved with apt-show-versions that does them both: list all the packages installed and their respective version and also it can show what are the upgrades available and their version.

apt-show-versions is not automatically installed so we have to install it first:

aptitude install apt-show-versions

Now, if I want to see all the packages installed and their version I will run it without any parameter (maybe you will want to pipe the command with more or output it to a file as the list will be probably quite large):

apt-show-versions |more
php4-gd/stable uptodate 4:4.3.10-16
groff-base/etch uptodate 1.18.1.1-12
m4/etch uptodate 1.4.4-1
libmysqlclient15off/etch uptodate 5.0.20-1
ncftp/etch uptodate 2:3.1.9-1
...

As you can see the list is not sorted so maybe it will be useful to sort the output:

apt-show-versions |sort |more
acpid/etch uptodate 1.0.4-5
adduser/etch uptodate 3.87
apache2-common/etch uptodate 2.0.55-4
apache2-mpm-prefork/etch uptodate 2.0.55-4
apache2-prefork-dev/etch uptodate 2.0.55-4
apache2-utils/etch uptodate 2.0.55-4
apt/etch uptodate 0.6.43.3
...

If I want to see the available upgrades I will have to just include the -u parameter:

apt-show-versions -u
php4-pgsql/etch upgradeable from 3:4.3.10-4 to 4:4.4.2-1+b1
php4-interbase/etch upgradeable from 4.3.10-2 to 4:5.1.2-1
php4-imagick/etch upgradeable from 0.9.11-0.2 to 4:0.9.11+1-2
...