migrating svn repositories and setting up http access

A computer holding svn repositories crashed. Detailed investigation suggested it was a motherboard failure.
Task: Move svn repositories to a different computer and setup http access to svn repositories.

1. Used CiT 3.5 inch USB 2.0 SATA and IDE HDD Enclosure to convert the internal hard drive into an external hard drive.

2. copied the parent folder holding all repositories to a new server (e.g. ~/work/svn-repos).

3. sudo chown -R www-data:admin1 ~/work/svn-repos

here, www-data is the apache2 user on ubuntu and admin1 is the group with rights to read write into svn-repos.  You might have a different group here.

# install apache, svn and a module that enables communication between apache and svn repositories
4. sudo apt-get install apache2 subversion libapache2-svn

# edit the apache configuration to tell where to find repositories
5. sudo nano /etc/apache2/httpd.conf
—–
# load the two modules needed for communication between apache and svn
# loading these modules allows displaying svn repo contents
LoadModule dav_module modules/mod_dav.so
LoadModule dav_svn_module modules/mod_dav_svn.so

<Location /svn>
DAV svn
# Automatically map any “/svn/foo” URL to repository /var/svn/foo
SVNParentPath /home/admin1/work/svn-repos

# Authentication: Basic
AuthName “Subversion repository”
AuthType Basic
AuthUserFile /home/admin1/work/svn-repos/htpasswd

# Authorization: Authenticated users only
Require valid-user
</Location>

—-
# restart apache2 server
6. sudo service apache2 restart

Ofcourse, you might have existing repositories checked out on client machines. If your access URLs have not changed, you don’t need to do anything and your client machines will work just fine. But incase if you have a different URL, use the following command in top-level folder of every repository you’ve checked out on your client machines.

svn switch –relocate <oldURL> <newURL> .

Installing picasa 3.9 on ubuntu

I thought it would be as easy as “sudo apt-get install …” but it wasn’t.  To my surprise I found that Google has officially stopped supporting Picasa 3.9 on Linux.  Of course you can use version 3.8 and it would work just fine however if you don’t want to miss on all the new features of 3.9. here is the trick:

So far so good. It installed fine and I could open picasa and import images.  But then when I tried to login into my google account, it came up with a blank window — with no form controls to login into my a/c.

Further investigations suggested that I needed to install IE6 for the form to work correctly. But if you use the default configurations of winetricks, the installation of IE6 fails.  So here is the trick that worked for me.

  • Obtain ie60.exe by visiting the following URL. Wait here for a couple of seconds and the browser should start downloading ie60.exe file.

http://www.oldversion.com/download.php?version=%2Fdownload-Internet-Explorer-6.0-%28Full-Installer%29.html

  • Copy the file ie60.exe inside ~/.cache/winetricks/ie6
  • Edit line 7350 in /usr/bin/winetricks

<< w_download http://browsers-us.mirrors.zensoft.net/ie/win32/6.0/ie60.exe 8e483db28ff01a7cabd39147ab6c59753ea1f533

>> w_download http://localhost/ie/ie60.exe 8e483db28ff01a7cabd39147ab6c59753ea1f533

  • WINEARCH=win32 WINEPREFIX=~/.wine sh /usr/bin/winetricks -q ie6
  • restart picasa

Done!