Tag: debian-en

Building a lab VM based on Debian for a MOOC, using Vagrant + VirtualBox

We’ve been busy setting up a Virtual Machine (VM) image to be used by participants of a MOOC that’s opening in early september on Relational Databases at Telecom SudParis.

We’ve chosen to use Vagrant and VirtualBox which are used to build, distribute and run the box, providing scriptability (reproducibility) and making it portable on most operating systems.

The VM itself contains a Debian (jessie) minimal system which runs (in the background) PostgreSQL, Apache + mod_php, phpPgAdmin, and a few applications of our own to play with example databases already populated in PostgreSQL.
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Using RDFAlchemy together with RDFLib’s SPARQLStore to query DBPedia and process resources in OO way

I’ve been searching for interesting ways to manipulate RDF graphs in Python, to create an application that would handle Linked Data Resources in an OO-way, i.e. using Python classes and not tables/sets/lists of triples. The data will be persisted in graphs in a triple store, accessed through a SPARQL enpoint.

In this post, I’ll illustrate how I managed to tie RDFLib’s SPARQLStore plugin and RDFAlchemy to reach a rather nice looking result.

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Debian docker containers using a modified baseimage-docker

I have been testing Docker for a few weeks now, and investigated the use of baseimage-docker, which provides support for supervising services with runit, and includes OpenSSH, among other things, based on an Ubuntu base system. Of couse, I’m interested in a Debian counterpart.

I had initially followed instructions provided by Steve Kemp which also prepared a Debian image including OpenSSH and runit, but it appears that baseimage-docker provides more tiny bits that avoid reinventing the wheel.

I’ve then forked the baseimage-docker to do a quick and dirty adaptation for Debian. There’s a sid variant (my ‘debian’ branch) and a wheezy one (my ‘wheezy’ branch, unsurprisingly). I haven’t used all features of baseimage-docker, so things might break for sure.

For the records, I’m playing with it as a base image to construct a docker-based container running the FusionForge test suite.

Did I warn you it’s quick and dirty and without any warranty ? Hoping that this is useful anyway.

Tagged a first version of the TWiki to FusionForge’s MediaWiki converter

As announced previously, I’ve been hacking on a migration tool allowing to import into the MediaWiki of a FusionForge project, a conversion of the contents of a TWiki wiki.

I’ve succesfully imported a first project (from PicoForge to FusionForge) using the tool, so I’ve decided to tag a first release and make the Git repo accessible.

More details at : https://fusionforge.int-evry.fr/projects/pytwiki2mediawi/

Feel free to ask here in the comments or by email, in case of need.

And, yes, my Python is most likely awful, but at least, this works, and much more featureful than existing tools I could test.

Working on a TWiki to MediaWiki converter (targetting FusionForge wikis)

I’m currently working on a wiki converter allowing me to transfer old TWiki wikis (hosted on picoforge) to MediaWikis hosted on FusionForge.

Unlike existing tools that I’ve found that more or less target the same needs, mine will address two peculiarities :

  • using MediaWiki’s API to perform the import, where many tools seemed to use SQL requests: this should allow non-administrator users to do the job,
  • importing to wikis of projects hosted on FusionForge instances, even when the project is not public, which means that the API calls need to authenticate to FusionForge first.

The tool is written in Python, and will include my own crappy wiki syntax converter in Python, instead of spawning existing Perl scripts, as others did.

It may happen to work for FosWiki too, but I don’t intend to use it beyond our old TWiki installations, for a start.

Stay tuned for more progress updates.

Edit: I’ve now released a first version.