Package dependency for installing virtualbox guest additions on Open SuSE 10.3

The problem at hand..

Well, I had to get the shared folder feature working on Open SuSE 10.3 virtual machine for a variety of reasons, and in turn, I had to install guest additions on virtualbox 1.6.4. There were a bunch of package dependencies even before coming to this error, and unfortunately, I dont have the entire series of command that I issued, but in this posting, I will attempt to present the solution of the immediate error that I was facing.

The KERN_INCL variable had to be set to the /usr/include directory:

linux-jo4o:/usr/src/linux # env | grep KER
KERN_INCL=/usr/include

After mounting the guest additions CD and running the VboxAdditions.run command as root, the kernel was not able to be compiled and this was visible in the install log:

linux-jo4o:~/addons # more /var/log/vboxadd-install.log

Installing VirtualBox 1.6.4 Guest Additions, built Tue Jul 29 20:13:59 CEST 2008

Testing the setup of the guest system

Building a test kernel module...

make KBUILD_VERBOSE=1 -C /lib/modules/2.6.22.5-31-default/build SUBDIRS=/tmp/sel
fgz1883915647/module/test SRCROOT=/tmp/selfgz1883915647/module/test modules
make[1]: *** No rule to make target `modules'.  Stop.
make: *** [vboxadd_test] Error 2

Building the test kernel module failed.
Giving up due to the problems mentioned above.
linux-jo4o:~/addons #

Initial thoughts and a potential solution

Initially, I thought that maybe it was a problem due to missing symbolic link to the modules directory (??), but when I posted this question on the vbox-users mailing list (which I think is more effective than the forums at times), I got a response saying that maybe I should check if the kernel-source package was installed or not.

To even find the package, we needed the main SOURCE repository added in the YAST setup. This is what the installed online repositories looked like:



When I ran the following command as root, it was clear that this was the missing link:

linux-jo4o:~ # zypper install kernel-source
* Reading repository 'Main Repository (NON-OSS)' cache
* Reading repository 'openSUSE-10.3-OSS-KDE 10.3' cache
* Reading repository 'Main Repository (Sources)' cache
* Reading repository 'Main Repository (OSS)' cache
* Reading installed packages [100%]

The following NEW package is going to be installed:
  kernel-source 

Overall download size: 49.2 M. After the operation, additional 243.4 M will be used.
Continue? [yes/no]: yes
Downloading package kernel-source-2.6.22.5-31.i586, 49.2 M (243.4 M unpacked)
Downloading: media
* Downloading [100%]
Downloading: kernel-source-2.6.22.5-31.i586.rpm
* Downloading [100%]
* Installing: kernel-source-2.6.22.5-31 [100%]
linux-jo4o:~ #

Now, when I tried installing the guest additions, it was able to install them and recompile the kernel JUST fine. Sweet!

linux-jo4o:~ # /media/VBOXADDITIONS_1.6.4_33808/VboxAdditions.run
Verifying archive integrity... All good.
Uncompressing
VirtualBox 1.6.4 Guest Additions for Linux
installation.............................................................................................................................................................................
VirtualBox 1.6.4 Guest Additions installation
Building the VirtualBox Guest Additions kernel module...
Building the shared folder support kernel module...
Installing the VirtualBox Guest Additions...

Successfully installed the VirtualBox Guest Additions.
You must restart your guest system in order to complete the installation.
linux-jo4o:~ #

How to get the enhanced Rich text editing buttons in wordpress.com editor?

The why -- Bloggers need Rich text editing..

If you are a newbie wordpress.com blogger, chances are that at some point you would have pulled your hair out trying to figure out how the heck to display the rich text editing buttons that would give you the MS word like editing features. I definitely remember doing that, it was an uphill experience. Believe me, I had "seriously" tried to look for it in Google and wordpress forums -- only to be told that you are probably mistaking wordpress.com for wordpress.org (arrgh!) and that its not part of the free wordpress.com blog (that was support talking -- can you believe that?).

I am posting this in the hope that a fellow newbie like me would not be in the same boat and gets productive right off the bat.

This is what you might originally see when you write a new post..

Life was difficult with this kind of editor. To put heading tags, I had to use the HTML editor and put these tags in manually, which was a royal pain:

Then one fine day...

It was Serendipity. Nothing less. While editing a post, I hit a key by mistake, and Viola!, there it was, the rich text palette, right in front of it. I had really no idea what had caused the second half of rich text editing buttons to come up, but I could see that it was not disappearing even after many shutdown and startups of my laptop.

Strangely, it would not come up on my other computers even though I was logged into the same wordpress account.

Its the kitchen sink, silly..

Serendipity - Part 2. God has his ways of revealing his glories. This fine day, I accidently clicked on the color palette icon on the extreme right end in the hope of getting some colors, but instead, I got the rich text editing buttons in the editor! The so called color palette was called the Kitchen sink. Duh! How ignorant of me. Thank you Almighty, for delivering me from ignorance.

So this is how it looked now:

Life was beautiful now...

I could do different kind of formatting, underlining, paste from word, erase, indenting, undo, redo, heading, color change etc.



Hope you find this useful too. Do leave me a message if you do.

An assessment of CiviCRM for non-profits

Introduction

Lately, we have been evaluating open source CRM softwares that are available in the market. Remarkably speaking, the CRM software market seems to really on the move with SugarCRM and CiviCRM being some of the most popular and widely used open source softwares.

Our Requirements in a nutshell

We are a small non profit service organization and have the need of maintaining contacts ( volunteers, donors, media contacts, partner organizations, NGOs etc), accounting/donor/fund raising information and potentially a document knowledge base and project management/event planning functionality. In addition, we needed mass personalized mailing functionality as well and an ability to define internal hierarchy or relationship between volunteers or organizations.

Till now, we were maintaining all our information in Yahoo! groups Files section or not even that in some cases. Contacts were kept in different forms, most of the times misplaced and rarely followed up on properly. Out of sight is out of mind and thats what happened.

CiviCRM

Well, I was looking at online articles and blogs about similar non-profit organizations who may implemented open source CRM softwares, and that's when I came to know about Civicrm. I spent about a day installing it on Drupal 5.x (civicrm 2.0 does not work with Drupal 6.x yet) and exploring it.

The scope of this article is limited to CiviCRM and observations around it. But as all things, there is good news and there is bad news. Let me start with the good news.

Good features:

1) The GUI is quite simple and intuitive for administrators. Most of the features and projected functionality can be figured out easily.

2) Contact management and defining different kinds of relationships is simple. You can define relationships between individuals, groups and organizations, which is quite extensible. For a contact, you can define associated grants, notes, meetings, groups, memberships, relationships, mails etc, kind of like a central view.

3) Contribute and Grants module are good for Integration with online payment system like Googlc checking or Paypal and for tracking and pre-scheduling donations

4) CiviMail can do personalized mailings. Attachments dont seem to be possible (at least I could not see it work). Messages can be tracked etc, but the reporting interface does not compare with SugarCRM (more evolved). For actually triggering the mail delivery a cron job has to be run and for bounce processing, some extra unix utilies (e.g. AMaViS,postfix) have to be configured

5) Customization to current forms or tables is easy. When we upgrade to a newer version of CiviCRM, the Custom Data Fields and Custom Data Groups will be maintained. Specialized customizations using the PHP programming language will need to be re-created when you upgrade, however.

6) The data model is simpler and easy to understand. The entity relationship diagram is available at
http://wiki.civicrm.org/confluence/display/CRMDOC/CiviCRM+ERD+2.0

7) It has a planner features too -- activities, meetings etc (types can be defined).

8) Good user integration/sync with Drupal and Joomla

9) Although there is no menu link for CiviReports, the reports are available through http://wiki.civicrm.org/confluence/display/CRMDOC/CiviReport. There are a lot of sql queries also that are available online on wiki.civicrm.org

Some other features -- but not essential for us:

1) CiviEvent is useful for putting signup pages for events. I thought it was kind of interesting though. Its good for promoting events and signing up people into your contact database.

2) CiviMember module can be used for tracking memberships to the organization (e.g. lifemember, goldmember etc). We did not need this functionality as we do not charge anything for membership, but it could be used at some point of time.

3) Can Configure Google or Yahoo Maps to work with CiviCRM. This is actually kind of cool. I always wanted to implement something like for our website wherein a project's location in the world could be shown through yahoo or google map.

4) The CitizenSpeak module allows the creation of email petition campaign nodes. Users enter the email recipients and the a message to create a campaign. When someone visits the node, they see a form that displays a preview of the message and allows them to enter their contact information and a personal statement. When they submit the form, the target of the campaign is notified. The version currently in CVS is built against Drupal 4.6. (http://drupal.org/project/citizenspeak)

Features lacking:

1) project Management -- This feature is present in sugarcrm Community Edition and we though we could use it for managing events (their tasks) and sharing event templates between chapters

2) Document management -- This feature would have been done to implement a knowledge base system for our volunteers and organization in general.

3) Can't create a new module through GUI, but APIs are published.

4) Leads and Opportunity Management are not present and not differentiated

Some Interesting Facts:

Amnesty International uses CiviCRM to collect website registration data and process online donations

Overall thoughts

I felt that the civicrm product is in initial stages and will see a lot of change or value addition in the near future. There are a lot of things coming and they will come slowly. From the http://civicrm.org/architecture, I could see that there was already talk of more performance or caching features in 2.1 version.

All in all, It still has some ways to go before it can catch up with sugarCRM. But then, civicrm is focused exclusively on non-profit organizations and is designed for them. It will have its own growth path: one that would may be less spectacular than sugarcrm for a little while, but it sure packs a lot of potential in it.