Mark Brown's Blog

One of my favorite things about Linux and/or Ubuntu is that I get to use the email client Evolution . I'm not a fan of Microsoft Outlook at all, and Evolution is a perfect replacement for it. All the features but none of the Microsoft bull.

I've also found myself using Google's Calendar lately. My wife and I use it to keep track of when bills are due, when the kids' baseball or what ever sport practices are and to keep track of all the family and friends birthdays and such. My wife and I each have our own calendar, and share it with each other to keep up to date. Pretty neat how it works.

Now that I'm using Ubuntu at home almost exclusively I found myself not wanting to import or retype all those dates from Google Calendar. So, I got to looking around and found that you can publish your calendar in 3 formats. iCal, XML, and HTTP. I then started looking around in Evolution and found that you can add web calendars to the calendar views. So, here's what I did.

In Google Calendar, I went to "Manage Calendars", then clicked on my calendar and at the bottom of that page there are a couple sections. Calendar Address and Private Address.

The Calendar Address Section is only for appointments that are made public, but the Private Address is for everything on your calendar.

So, I clicked on the iCal button and it pops up a window with a URL in it. I copied that URL.

Then, in Evolution, I went to my Calendar, and in the upper lefthand pane of the window I right clicked and choose New Calendar.

That popped up a New Calendar window. For Type: I choose "On the Web", For name, just put something in there to distinguish which calendar it is, then under URL I pasted the URL that Google gave me. When I pasted it in the New Calendar window, I had to take the http:// section of the URL and make it webcal://, It should look something like this webcal//www.google.com/calendar../basic.ics.

Clicked Ok on that New Calendar Window, Restarted Evolution and there it was, my entire Google Calendar displayed in the Calendar in Evolution.

Pretty neat stuff.

Of course I couldn't leave well enough along, so I decided to try the same thing with Microsoft Outlook. I only worked on it for about 10 minutes, which is about how long it took me to set it up with Evolution, but I couldn't find a way to add web calendars to Outlook 2003. I'm not surprised...nor did I expect to be able to.  It the abilitiy is there, it's not nearly as intuitive to setup as Evolution was, and I didn't really want to spend the time digging thru help files and forums to figure it out.

Anyway, they may be old news to some of you, but hopefully it'll help someone else get just a bit more organized

 BTW, I read an article that a Windows version of Evolution has been released.  I haven't tried it yet, but hopefully it works as well as the Linux version.

Later,

Mark

Well, after 2 weeks and one day of working diligently, well, about 3 hours a night give or take, I'm throwing in the towel on the Ununtu/BD and/or Ubuntu/Coldfusion thing.  I can not get either to work.  

I've followed 4 diffent how to's, reinstalled Ubuntu Desktop 6 time and server 3 times on 3 different computers. 1 mine and 2 I borrowed from work.  I've made sure to follow the tutorials verbatim.  Even to the point of making sure my directory structure matched the tutorials and I started cutting and pasting the commands in. I've even had the writer of one tutorials ssh into my machine to help me figure it out.  Still have not successfully served up one single coldfusion page from any of my computers.  

The only thing I haven't tried yet is trying to install it on something other than a Dell computer.  I can't imagine why that would make any difference, but I've tried it on a Optiplex GX 620, 260 and 280.  I'm not having any problems at all with any drivers in Ubuntu.  Problem there is I don't have access to anything other than Dell's, and don't want to buy a new pc just for this.

 They've all had wireless cards in them as my computer room doesn't have any cat5 anywhere close.  Does that matter?  I have no idea.

What I do know is I haven't actually written any ColdFusion for 2 weeks.   Now that's sad!

 I'm thinking what I may do at this point is get vmware installed and running, install windows on a virtual machine and host it all from there.

Why am I telling you all this?  I don't know, I guess I'm just venting.  Maybe after I actually  get some code written I'll quit feeling so defeated!  LOL 

 I'm going to decompress over an IPA from a brewery in Oregon now...

Well, I've made some progress here. Beside my not reading the documentation good enough about the datasourses, it's gone pretty good.

I've got Apache 2 and Blue Dragon 7rc installed. The admin page and built in webserver are working, but the Apache connector isn't working, yet.

So, here's what I've done so far. I found Adam Howitt's Blog about installing BD 7 with Apache 2.l2 on Draper Drake Ubuntu and a post on we3geeks explaining how to do this. Neither article uses the exact version numbers I have, but they are close.

So, i installed Apache 2 from the Synatics Package manager in Ubuntu, If your so new to Ubuntu that you don't know how to do this, email me or check out the Ubuntu forums . I'd love to help you with what I can.

Once I installed Apache, i tested it, and it worked.

I then downloaded BlueDragon. While it was downloading I read the BlueDragon 7 Installation guide. Personally, and don't laugh, you need to know more than me to follow the Linux instructions in that manual. we3geeks for me was much more helpful. Don't get me wrong, it's a good manual as far as manuals go, but the we3geeks is a bit more helpful for the install part.

 So, based on the the we3geeks article,I started to setting up the directory structure. Well, I'm still new enough on Linux that I've not created to many symbolic links.  So, just to make sure I was right I verified that my apache was located where is was supposed to be.  In my Ubuntu the 4 directories I was  concerned with were located here:

"/etc/apache2

/var/www <--document root

/usr/lib/apache2/modules

/usr/sbin/apache2 "

Once I verified where those directories were located I followed the we3geeks leading and typed in a terminal the following.

"sudo mkdir -p /usr/local/apache/bin

sudo mkdir -p /usr/local/apache/conf

sudo ln -s /etc/apache2/apache2.conf /usr/local/apache/conf/httpd.conf

sudo ln -s /var/www /usr/local/apache/htdocs

sudo ln -s /usr/lib/apache2/modules /usr/local/apache/modules

sudo ln -s /usr/sbin/apache2 /usr/local/apache/bin/httpd"

If for some reason your apache is located somewhere other than the from directories listed above, I think all you would need to do is put your paths as the first argument in the lines that start "sudo ln -s /"  Your local paths would be the first path listed, as the second path listed on each line in the path is the symbolic link?  Right?  LOL I told you I'm no linux guy.  now that is done, I moved to installing BlueDragon.  

One note on the install, the article on we3geeks doesn't talk about it, but the BlueDragon Install guide does. You can install blue dragon in either GUI or console mode. Since I'm a GUI kinda guy, I chose the GUI instal.  If I would have done a console install I would have typed "sudo sh BlueDragon_Server_70_337-Linux.sh -i console"

The install was pretty uneventful.  I took the defaults on everything.  If you take the default on everything remember the number, 9999.  That's the Apache port number that BlueDragon talks to Apache on via the Apache connector. 

 At this point I restarted apache, then BlueDragon.

 " sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart" and then

"  cd /usr/local/NewAtlanta/BlueDragon_Server_70/bin/" <--Default BlueDragon Location

then " sudo StopBlueDragon.sh" 

then " sudo StartBlueDragon.sh"

 At that point, I tested the admin console by going to http://localhost:8080/bluedragon/admin.cfm in my browser.  it worked!  Cool.

 I then tried Apache by creating a very simple test.cfm page that set the time as a variable and outputs it.  Not so cool it didn't work. 

At this point it was 11:00 and I have to be up at 5am, so that where I stopped for now.

 That at least got me started.  BD is a least working.  So on to my next project of figuring out what I did wrong to make Apache not work with it.

I'm leaving for Colorado for a few days tomorrow and won't be able to mess with it until next week, but I'll update the status when i figure something out.

 Any help you guys could lend as a good place to start looking for the Apache problem I'd love to hear it!

Later,

Mark