Warwick Bruce Chapman

I’m now proudly running Ubuntu 10.10 upgraded from 10.04 as my day to day operating system on my PC.  What broke during the upgrade? Just my Lenovo X301′s trackpoint scrolling. This is when you hold the middle of the Trackpoint’s buttons while moving the Trackpoint to scroll.

Previously in Ubuntu Lucid (10.04) and Intrepid (9.10) getting Trackpoint scrolling working meant editing the X.Org pointer configuration manually – something just not within the grasp of the average user.

The great news for users of Ubuntu’s latest release Maverick Meerkat or 10.10 (released on 10/10/10) is that using GPointing Devices this can be configured with just a few clicks.

Simply:
- Search for and install “gpointing” in Ubuntu Software Centre
- Go to System > Preferences > Pointing devices
- Enable “Use wheel emulation”, choose button 2, and enable both vertical and horizontal scroll
- Click, OK – et Voila!

The Democratic Alliance has deployed Sakai for use as a Learning Environment and for its potential use for intra-organisational collaboration. Our deployment runs Debian Lenny in a KVM environment and is built from source.

During the course of this deployment, assisted by members of the Sakai community, especially UCT, a few lessons worth sharing, which assume Debian as they deployment platform, were learned:

1. Java can be deployed using the Debian packages:
   1. Add “non-free” to /etc/apt/sources.list:
      
deb http://ftp.de.debian.org/debian lenny main
deb http://ftp.de.debian.org/debian lenny non-free
deb http://security.debian.org/ lenny/updates main
deb http://security.debian.org/ lenny/updates non-free


   2. Update aptitude and install Java 6 (more):
      
      aptitude update
      aptitude install sun-java6-jdk

2. Do NOT deploy Apache’s Tomcat and Maven from packages, use the source packages:
   1. Install Tomcat from Apache package:
      
cd /opt
wget http://ftp-stud.hs-esslingen.de/pub/Mirrors/ftp.apache.org/dist/tomcat/tomcat-5/v5.5.28/bin/apache-tomcat-5.5.28.tar.gz
tar xzf apache-tomcat-5.5.28.tar.gz
mv apache-tomcat-5.5.28 tomcat

   2. Install Maven from Apache package, Debian package (2.0.9) is too old:
      
      cd /opt
      wget http://ftp-stud.hs-esslingen.de/pub/Mirrors/ftp.apache.org/dist/maven/binaries/apache-maven-2.2.1-bin.tar.bz2
      tar xjf apache-maven-2.2.1-bin.tar.bz2
      mv apache-maven-2.2.1 maven2

3. Create a deployment script which does the following:
   1. Deploys a fresh Tomcat install
   2. (Optional) Patches the source tree with any changes
   3. Builds Sakai with Maven
   4. Copies Sakai configuration
   5. (Optional) Deploys the MySQL connector to Tomcat
   6. Replaces the running Tomcat instance with the new deployment
   7. Copies the skin and other post deployment templates

A sample of our deployment script is available here. The string “SakaiLocalName” should be replaced with the name for your organisation’s Sakai deployment.