Category: Development

an unexpected git surprise

whbeebe

I use git and GitHub to back up my “precious” source code. Precious because of the time I spent writing it, and I don’t have time to either recreate it if it should get wiped out or try to back out some stupid breaking change I made to a perfectly working application. My source repo is here ( https://github.com/wbeebe/ ). This isn’t the only GitHub presence I created. For reasons that are important anymore, I create another presence for bill-the-old-dev with a different email address (this will be an important point later in this little story). A couple of days ago I decided to go back to my primary GitHub presence and check in some code I’d written so I can back it up against my stupidity as well as make it available to all my other home systems.

That new source location is here: https://github.com/wbeebe/AndroidStudioProjects . When I created this locally on my development system I used the e-mail address I used when creating the GitHub presence bill-the-old-dev. I never thought that the push up to GitHub after the initial local creation would be associated to any other presence but my original identity, because that’s how I was logged in. But sure enough the initial checkin on GitHub was associated with bill-the-old-dev. I mean, after all I am Bill the old developer, but still…

Figure 1: Same guy, two different identities based on e-mail

After the initial push I edited ~/.gitconfig (the global GIT configuration file) and changed the user email to the e-mail account I’d used to first create my GitHub presence. Sure enough, when I pushed up the next change, GitHub showed it was from by my original GitHub presence, as you can see in Figure 1 in the red outlined area down in the lower right corner. In the grand scheme of things it’s no big deal. However going forward I need to be careful to be consistent or else I’ll get surprised again.

Lesson learned: It might be that a “foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds,” but for all things on GitHub, consistency is a very good practice to follow, and it’s never foolish. Always be consistent with your identity in particular, especially the correct e-mail address, because GitHub uses e-mails to determine who contributes to a given project.

sampling zorin os core 16.1

whbeebe

I’ve been looking other Linux distributions for a development environment going forward. Tonight I decided to look at Zorin OS ( https://zorin.com/ ). I’ve read a number of positive remarks, usually in the same post with positive remakes about Linux Mint.

I downloaded and installed Zorin OS Core 16.1 inside another Parallels virtual machine. As with Linux Mint I successfully installed Parallel Tools inside the Zorin VM (in order to do that I had to execute sudo apt install build-essential to pick up the necessary build tools). A quick tour and a check of a few key item of interest to me showed it was a solid distribution, like Mint, but unique in its own way. This won’t be a review of any kind, more like a “proof of life” post.

I did a little checking and discovered that Zorin, like Mint, is based on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. Not a problem, as LTS means long term support. It makes no matter to me what version it’s based on, as I will install whatever current tools I need in parallel with the out-of-the-box tools. What I want is a distribution that is more developer friendly for the work I do. In particular brltty isn’t a part of the distribution. It is a part of Ubuntu 22.04 LTS, and is even more embedded in Pop!_OS. When brltty is installed and running it interferes with ESP32 devices that connect via USB and are mapped by the kernel to tty devices, causing the device to disconnect and making it impossible to program and debug ESP32 devices. The fact that Ubuntu 20.04 LTS does not have this installed is a strong plus in its favor, as well as any other current distributions still based on 20.04.

I was quite happy to see that the desktop defaults to Xorg, allowing Wayland to be an alternate. Not the surprise I discovered with Fedora 36 on a VM.

Overall I liked the look and feel of the installation. Zorin Core is complete enough for my work. I can install the bits I need and it will all work. Looks like I’ve two good distributions for my AMD development machine to mull over.