Minor issue with Ubuntu Desktop

Linux and Ubuntu are awesome. I switched from developing on Windows XP to Ubuntu Desktop in late 2007 (7.04 or Feisty Fawn). I will never again develop on an windows machine. Hopefully I won't ever work for a company that requires a windows platform, but at that point I would rather buy my own work computer or setup Ubuntu in a virtual instance. I really appreciate Rob Madole and Brian O'Neill for showing my the right path. I remember Brian's frustration anytime he was forced to pair with me on my windows machine. Now I am like that with my co-workers.

Even though Ubuntu is great, I still have one minor compliant. Well it's really 3 things combined: Extended Monitor support, Compiz, and Gnome-Do. I am addicted to all 3, but trying to get all 3 to work together seems impossible.

Extended Monitor Support
The big problem here is going back and forth between work and home. At work I want to use my monitor, but at home I use just the laptop monitor. In the past I ran nvidia-settings when I wanted go back and forth. This has been improved with some help from Ron Alleva by using the xrandr command. He gave me some alias's to run when I wanted to switch. When I first installed 8.10, I used those alias's, but it seems lately its being auto-detected because when I plug my monitor in at work, ubuntu recognizes it and I don't have to run anything. Nor do I have to run anything now when I get home. So it would seem I have a good handle on this now, but when using an extended monitor other things don't work.

Compiz
I love compiz mainly for one thing: transparency in my terminal. I'm sure I have set a million other settings before, but enabling the Normal Visual Effects under the System > Preferences > Appearance setting is usually one of the first things I do. I believe this setting uses Compiz. With this setting enabled, my terminal window is transparent enough that I can see other applications in the background, like firefox or pidgin which I typically have behind terminal without having to switch back and forth. Unfortunately, it seems I can't have this setting enabled when I have an extended monitor.

Gnome-Do
Man I love it. I am hoping to eventually get to a point to where I have an entirely clean desktop like this. My favourite is the docky option seen here which is similar to Mac's Spotlight. Gnome-Do works just fine with an extended monitor, but docky requires compiz to be running in Normal mode and if you recall compiz doesn't work for me when using an extra monitor.

This is probably a pretty minor compliant verses all the ones I had against Windows, so I don't expect any new patches coming out of Canonical. In an ideal world, my extra monitor would just be automatically detected, compiz would work, and therefore gnome-do docky would work.

Maven Global Excludes

To my knowledge, maven2 currently does not have the ability to globally exclude dependencies. Instead there is the tedius way of excluding a transitive dependency inline with the direct dependency (see Conflict Resolution) For complex multi-module projects, this can be difficult to manage and having the ability to exclude a dependency globally could be very useful. Seems like others share the same feelings (MNG-3196). Unfortunately, for maven2 users this is targeted for maven3. So until then, here is a tip on how to globally exclude dependencies in your project (provided by my co-worker Ron Alleva).

To globally exclude a dependency all you need to do is set the dependencies scope value to provided. This supports excluding transitive dependencies, which is really what you want.

So for example, let's assume I have a WAR project that depends on commons-logging-1.1, which according to "mvn dependency:tree" has a transitive dependency on avalon-framework-4.1.3.

[INFO] +- commons-logging:commons-logging:jar:1.1:compile
[INFO] |  +- logkit:logkit:jar:1.0.1:compile
[INFO] |  \- avalon-framework:avalon-framework:jar:4.1.3:compile

Assuming I want to exclude avalon-framework from my WAR, I would add the following to my projects POM with a scope of provided. This works across all transitive dependencies and allows you to specify it once.

<dependencies>
  <dependency>
      <artifactId>avalon-framework</artifactId>
      <groupId>avalon-framework</groupId>
      <version>4.1.3</version>
      <scope>provided</scope>
  </dependency>
</dependencies>

This even works when specifying it in the parent POM, which would prevent projects from having to declare this in all child POMs.

Ubuntu, Oracle XE, and SQLPLUS

In the past for local development, I have used MS SQL Server running in a VMware windows instance, but that got to be too burdensome and consumed to much of my 2GB of RAM (who would have thought that 10 years ago when I was playing Star Craft on a desktop with 32MB of RAM). Anyways, on a recent business trip with a co-worker (Matt White) who also runs ubuntu, he brought to my attention Oracle XE and how easy it was to install via apt-get and how small a footprint it was considering it's a database and it's Oracle.

I have been very impressed so far and would highly recommend it for linux users wanting a local database. Again, not only is it easy to install via apt-get once you add the repos, but I really don't notice it consuming too many resources.

Two hints I would like to self document more than anything is after installation the name of the SID is XE. You don't specify it during installation, but that is what it is. So my connection string in jboss looks like this:

jdbc:oracle:thin:@localhost:1521:XE

The second hint I wanted to self document is how to get sqlplus working. Personally, I'm often times too lazy to write straight SQL to manipulate data manually. Not only that but it's not a real good use of my time. But after this weekend I got familar with it again due to a lack of a good GUI tool like Oracle SQL Developer at one of our production sites. I was basically forced to use sqlplus to change a few values. The one huge benefit it has, is you don't have to wait on some slow GUI tool to load. So locally I now have, Oracle SQL Developer for extended use, got the SQL Query Plugin in Idea to use when writing code, and now sqlplus. So when I am impatient and I don't have Idea up, I plan on using sqlplus.

It doesn't work right out of the box. You have to set ORACLE_HOME and add it's bin directory in PATH and also set the ORACLE_SID.

I added the following to my home's .bashrc file:

export ORACLE_HOME=/usr/lib/oracle/xe/app/oracle/product/10.2.0/server
export ORACLE_SID=XE
export PATH=$ORACLE_HOME/bin:$PATH

After that reload the .bashrc file by running . .bashrc and then run sqlplus.