Marco Steinhäuser

More or less spontaneously, I decided to go to “Chemnitzer Linux-Tage” for the first time, the probably second biggest Linux event in Germany, and was really surprised: Not only Linux geeks but a very mixed up audience of Germans and Non-Germans, developers, administrators and interested people in any kind of open source software found together in a very familiar and comfortable atmosphere.

In my role as OXID Community Guide I usually go to such events to talk to owners of interesting projects and maybe find synergies and a surplus for the OXID community. The entry fee at € 5.- was more than reasonable and to be honest: I found more valuable contacts there than on my CeBIT visit a couple of days before.

Of course, I visited the booth of my favorite Linux distribution run by the guys of Ubuntu Deutschland e.V. and furthermore, the Communtu project. Communtu is a Ubuntu based Linux distribution that lets you choose which application projects to install but most interesting is the backup feature: When you have to refresh your installation (what may happen from time to time), you are able to store your complete configuration to the Communtu server and moreover, download a CD or DVD for your new installation without loosing any application.

Also the PIM and CRM project tine 2.0 is absolutely worth mentioning. Tine is based on the Zend Framework and makes extensive use of the JavaScript library jQuery. The project is still young, doesn’t provide that many features that you would expect and really took me some time to install it today. But from it’s approach, it is very promising and the code looks clear on a first glance.

YaCy is a Java based search engine software that I hope to get evaluated for use on oxid-esales.com as well as on OXIDforge as a replacement for the Google search service we implemented presently.

After listening to two talks about IT management and OTRS (Open Ticket Request System) I hooked up with the OTRS guys Shawn and Martin and apparently it turned really, really, really interesting. We use this Perl-based software very successfully in our support department and our installation needs to be adapted for our needs. Shawn is the new OTRS Community Manager and Martin actually the inventor of the OTRS system. Hope to collaborate very tightly with this guys in the future.

For the next year, I personally would really like to have an OXID booth at the “Chemitzer Linux-Tage”. Let’s see whether we can sort it out.

Of course, you have to announce your new blog posts over Twitter. A cool twitter client is not the worst idea – I personally decided to run Twhirl for this purpose because Twhirl is able to run multiple accounts.
As Twhirl is based on the platform Adobe Air, you first have to install this one.

1. Go to http://get.adobe.com/air/, download it to your /home/ folder.
2. Open the command line and type chmod +x AdobeAIRInstaller.bin
3. Type chmod +x AdobeAIRInstaller.bin
4. The Adobe Air installer will open up now in a new window. You will have to confirm the terms and conditions.

Time to install Twhirl:

1. Go to http://www.twhirl.org/ and click to the install button on the right hand side.
2. Again, an install routine opens up (inside Adobe Air). Choose your options for the Twhirl installation here.
3. A twhirl instance now should pop up. Enter your Twitter name(s) and your password here and you are done.

If you are in business, your companies’ IT policy is perhaps to run Microsoft products like Windows OS only. Although you might have a bit of freedom in this manner (let’s say because you are presenting on Open Source software fairs and need to run a Linux for this case) the switch might be not that easy thinking about Microsoft Exchange, Skype, VPN, Microsoft Office and so on. For me, it is really fun working on Linux and I would like to switch over completely as soon as possible. That’s why I ran Kubuntu as a parallel operating system.

Somehow, I got rid of running KDE on my Ubuntu installation and so I decided to install the Karmic Koala (Ubuntu 9.10) on a Gnome basis and I was really surprised about it’s simple handling. By the way: Gnome was suspect to me all the times I tried it before. Today I believe it was only about a simple and stupid marketing effect: I didn’t like the combination of brown, purple and orange on the desktop…

So now, let’s beginn with the Skype installation.
As you might know, Skype is proprietary software but obviously everybody in IT uses it. Nevertheless, the installation on Ubuntu is possible even including the update services. First of all you have to implement the Medibuntu sources to your sources.list file running this command on the terminal:

sudo wget http://www.medibuntu.org/sources.list.d/$(lsb_release -cs).list \
--output-document=/etc/apt/sources.list.d/medibuntu.list &&
sudo apt-get -q update &&
sudo apt-get --yes -q --allow-unauthenticated install medibuntu-keyring &&
sudo apt-get -q update


As a next step, install the Skype application:

sudo aptitude install skype


Despite Skype is only provided with version 2.1 on Linux, you are done mate! Somehow you will be connected to your colleagues, friends, etc. in this first step. More to follow.