Eclipse Europa is Available

Today marks the release of Eclipse Europa, the next version of Eclipse's open source framework and components. This is a great achievement by Eclipse and a testament to the power of open source--the on-time, simultaneous, coordinated release of 21 distinct projects is a fantastic feat. Even the largest software companies have trouble releasing a couple products together.

This is why at Red Hat, we are doing all of our development for JBoss Tools in open source at jboss.org. In fact, we are already targeting Eclipse Europa with our plugins. So, if you want to try out all the latest tools for building powerful and rich applications, try downloading Eclipse Europa and then installing the latest JBoss Tools builds! And, of course, you can look forward to Red Hat Developer Studio later this summer, which will certify and integrate all this, along with the JBoss Enterprise Application Platform.

Exadel Plugins Now Available in Open Source at JBoss Tools!

Today marks an important milestone for the upcoming Red Hat Developer Studio product from Red Hat: we have completed open sourcing the former Exadel Studio Pro plugins from the Red Hat/Exadel Partnership that we announced back at EclipseCon in March.

These plugins, along with the former JBoss IDE plugins, and some new ones (e.g. a Seam plugin) are all available at the JBoss Tools project at jboss.org. You can visit the JBoss Tools project to check out the source code and download the latest versions of the plugins. And, of course, we'd welcome your participation in the open source project too.

One of the most exciting aspects of our open sourcing Exadel's plugins at jboss.org is that this marks the first time that developer tools of this caliber have been available in open source. Previously, all the major Eclipse-based tools vendors built their offerings on top of an open source foundation (Eclipse). But, they kept their most desirable features proprietary and sold them to customers. At Red Hat, we believe the best way to help developers is to provide them with a powerful and completely open source set of development tools and platforms.

For developers that want the latest versions of our plugins and like to remain at the tip of our technology, they are welcome to go to JBoss Tools and tailor-assemble their own, ideal development environment. For developers that prefer an integrated, supportable, and stable development environment that offers great technology, Red Hat has a solution too. Later this summer, Red Hat will be introducing a new product around the JBoss Tools project: Red Hat Developer Studio.

Red Hat Developer Studio will provide a subscription that includes and integrates:

• Eclipse 3.3 from the Eclipse Europa release
• Production-ready versions of the plugins from JBoss Tools and elsewhere, all tested and integrated together along with their dependencies into Eclipse
• The JBoss Enterprise Application Platform, which includes production-ready versions of JBoss Application Server, Hibernate, and Seam
  
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux
  
• Red Hat Network access for updates

Red Hat Developer Studio will provide one installer that sets up your entire development environment: Eclipse, plugins, and JBoss runtime platforms all integrated together. Of course, like all of our products, Red Hat Developer Studio will be 100% open source. And, it will run on a variety of platforms like Linux and Windows.

So, Red Hat will be offering a variety of solutions for developers. The plugins we have just open sourced at JBoss Tools will provide rich capabilities around many of the other projects at jboss.org. And, Red Hat Developer Studio will build upon JBoss Tools to offer a completely integrated and certified open source development environment. Please check out JBoss Tools and let us know what you think!

Stable Fedora 7 Wireless Networking on a Thinkpad T60

Fedora 7 includes new, free iwl3945 wireless drivers. This means that users with the Intel PRO/Wireless 3945 card in their laptops (like my T60 has) no longer have to install firmware and drivers manually to get wireless working like in FC6. This is great and makes Fedora much easier to install. Unfortunately, these new drivers don't seem to be quite stable yet. So, I've gone back to the old ipw3945 wireless drivers, which have been much more stable for me. Here's how I did it:

1. do a rpm install to get the freshrpms repo:
   

   
   rpm -ivh http://ftp.freshrpms.net/pub/freshrpms/fedora/linux/7/freshrpms-release/freshrpms-release-1.1-1.fc.noarch.rpm
   

   
   
2. install the ipw3945 packages:
   

   
   yum install -y ipw3945-kmdl-`uname -r` ipw3945
   

   
   


3. create /etc/modprobe.d/ipw3945 with the contents:
   

   
   install ipw3945 /sbin/modprobe --ignore-install ipw3945 ; sleep 0.5 ; /sbin/ipw3945d --quiet
   remove ipw3945 /sbin/ipw3945d --kill ; /sbin/modprobe -r --ignore-remove ipw3945
   

   
   
4. add to /etc/rc.local to start ipw3945:
   

   
   # start wireless networking
   modprobe -r ipw3945; sleep 0.5; modprobe ipw3945
   

   
   

That's it!

Note: If you ever update your kernel to a newer version, you will have to do a

yum install -y ipw3945-kmdl-`uname -r`

to get the corresponding wireless module for your new kernel. This is one of the disadvantages of going to the old ipw3945 drivers versus the ones included in Fedora 7.