NodeJS and JSHint on Fedora

Yesterday I blogged that it's a hassle to install these on Fedora. Apparently I was suffering from brain fog. It's not so bad once you do enough research and stumble across the right advice online.

First, if you're a bonehead and you've made a mess trying unsuccessfully to install v8/nodejs/npm/jshint eight or ten times already, clean things up:

sudo yum -y remove v8

The repository for picking up nodejs, npm, and v8 is http://nodejs.tchol.org/ which you can enable on your system as follows:

sudo yum localinstall --nogpgcheck \
  http://nodejs.tchol.org/repocfg/fedora/nodejs-stable-release.noarch.rpm

You want to avoid installing the wrong version of the V8 Javascript engine, so edit /etc/yum.repos.d/fedora-updates.repo and add the line

exclude=v8*

to the "[updates]" section.

Now you're ready to install everything:

sudo yum install npm

sudo npm install jshint -g

Setting up Ubuntu 12.04

My Linux distribution of preference is Ubuntu. Debian did a nice job on the package manger and Canonical did a nice job making it user-friendly. But some things in 12.04 desktop version, I don't need, like the Unity interface. So here's what I like to do to make 12.04 a little friendlier. This is particularly worthwhile when running in VirtualBox, a necessity because my employer is a Fedora shop, and it's a big hassle to run Node.js on Fedora, which I need to run JSHint to sanity-check our Javascript code.

I'm starting with a 40 gig disk image and for networking, a bridged adapter, so that when I run the server on the Ubuntu instance it will be accessible on the rest of the subnet. So first let's get rid of that silly Unity interface. Open a terminal window and run:

$ sudo apt-get install gnome-panel

Close the terminal window and log out. On the login screen, to the right of your name, you'll see a circular logo. Click on that to get a menu and select "GNOME Classic". Type in your password, and notice your blood pressure gently lowering as the familiar old Ubuntu desktop appears before you.

Assuming you're on a virtual machine, you'll really want to stop the screen locking up and requiring your password. So click on the gear in the upper right and select "System Settings", then select "Brightness and Lock". Toggle the "Lock" switch to "OFF" and uncheck the box "Require my password when waking from suspend". Dismiss that window.

Now install Node.js, JSHint, and a few other conveniences.

$ sudo su -
# apt-get install python-software-properties
# add-apt-repository ppa:chris-lea/node.js
# # You'll need to hit the Enter key to continue...
# apt-get update
# apt-get install nodejs npm
# npm install jshint -g
# apt-get install vim git gitk emacs subversion meld
# apt-get install apache2 mysql-server mysql-client pphp5 libapache2-mod-php5

# ^D

$

I like to package up my .ssh directory into a tarball and bring it to new machines when I set them up. Having stored my id_dsa.pub key in the .ssh/authorized_keys file on the Subversion server, I don't get constantly bothered to supply a password for every Subversion operation.

By all means set up a shared folder with your host machine. I map the host machine's /home/wware directory to a directory in /media. I need to be root to access it but it's still the easiest way to move things back and forth.

Blogging from a Raspberry Pi board

I've plugged an Ethernet cable into the Raspberry Pi and brought up the Midori web browser (which I had previously never heard of). As a web-browsing experience, the RPi is extremely slow, but it works. Google's new authentication scheme is a little dubious about Midori, not too surprising. But it rendered Facebook readably and I was able to look at some of my pictures on Flickr.

I intend to find some interesting hardware hack for the board, probably a musical instrument of some sort. Of course it won't be running X Windows at that point. If I get ambitious I might try to figure out how to create a stripped-down X-less Raspian distribution. I've done a little bit of distro hacking on Ubuntu in the past.

Even without X, I'm concerned about performance issues. Linux is not normally used for real-time use, but apparently I'm not the first person to wonder if that's feasible. Well I think I've exhausted my patience here.

Back on a normal computer. That was interesting, but enough is enough. Any RPi hacking that reaches a state of readiness for public consumption will be posted on Github, and notifications will appear here.

Before I forget, one handy note to other Yanks thrown by Raspian's curious keyboard mapping. You might have skipped over most of the options in raspi-config as I did (the first thing that appears on your screen after all those boot messages finish). Look for "keyboard configuration" and look for the canonical U.S. keyboard choices.

Here's a custom search engine for Raspberry Pi stuff, courtesy of Google.