Recent blog entries for rangerrick

I haven't been maintaining this journal because I now have a blog. Please check there instead. =)

It's been a while since I've updated this...

For the last couple of months I've slowly started working with the guys at the Fink project as a packager.

My big project right now is KDE on OSX -- we've got things mostly working, just lots of little corner work to do still. I'm still amazed that we've gotten things working as well as they do in just a few short months. When I first started tackling it it looked hopeless.

Well...

I just made a metric buttload of packages for fink: tomcat 4.0.1 and all of it's dependencies. Hopefully I haven't screwed anything up -- I've done a couple of packages before, but nothing on this scale.

I removed everything and rebuilt from scratch doing a "fink install tomcat" so I think it should build on everyone's systems... We'll see...

I'm now working on a package for the apache connector for tomcat. I probably won't submit it until tomorrow, 'cause it's way past my bedtime.

This is my first time playing out with Advogato; I figured I'd check it out and post a little about myself.

I'm a long-time Linux user who works for an open-source company developing network management software (in Java, which I initially had grave reservations about, but have since learned to like it's advantages). I hold a sort of jack-of-all-trades job, doing system administration, building workstations, managing the mailing lists, and, most importantly, handling build and change management for OpenNMS.

Our company seems to have an open-source business model that is actually working. We have 2 different sources of income.

1. Service and support on our open-source product.

2. Creating an "appliance" using OpenNMS for turnkey network management for small businesses.

We've gotten a few support contracts, and more coming in; we've actually exceeded our projections of resellers signing up for our appliance offering, and are working our way towards being profitable.

I've recently gotten an iBook, with the intent to put Linux on it, and maybe play with OSX a little. I have since fallen in love with OSX, and the Linux partition has gone away.

I'm now doing a lot of tinkering with Fink, a "distribution" for OSX. I'm still learning the political and technical ins and outs of building and packaging on OSX, but I hope to someday be of assistance in that regard, and package up OpenNMS as well.