Trac

While I was just digging around Dreamhost’s panel, I stumbled across a new One Click Install I had not seen before: Trac.

Trac is, according to their site,  an enhanced wiki and issue tracking system for software development projects. Nifty. The last time I had tried my hand with Trac, I think I almost lost my hands. But now, Dreamhost has made it super easy to get Trac, and Subversion (a Concurrent Version System, made super easy with TortoiseSVN) along with it.

Now, as excited as I was to get this ‘new’ thing running on my account, I realized I knew precious little about how to set it up beyond the One Click of  the famed One Click Installation process. True, Trac was now installed in my account, but what next?

A long story short, I figured someone else might walk down the same path (and get lost like I did). So I basically screenshotted the path of least resistance to setting up Trac and Subversion on Dreamhost.

This procedure, assumes of course, that you have a Dreamhost account. If you don’t, then, well, you could enjoy this game I wrote in javascript, before you move on.

Step 1: Set up Subversion

After you’ve logged into Dreamhost’s Panel, go to Subversion under Goodies. And fill out the form. The steps are fairly logical. You’ll get a delightful email from the Subversion creation Robot.

Setting up Subversion

Step 2: Installing Trac

Make use of the One-Click Install feature in Dreamhost Panel, and go to second set of options to Advance Install. Select Trac, and type in an install directory. Make sure that this is empty. Select the SVN repository that you created above. Click install. You’ll (hopefully) get another delightful email.

Install Trac in One Click

Step 3:

After step 2, you should have a Trac and Subversion SVN up and running at their respective addresses. However, you still have to create an Admin user to get things rolling. (Unless having a fixed default installation is what you had in mind all along)

In Trac, the user authentication is tied into something called htaccess. This is something directly involved with Apache, the web server, and its settings can be access from the Goodies>Htaccess/WebDAV menu option.

Clicking on it will lead you to a list of the domains you have. Click on the one that you have installed Trac to. Then click on create a new directory.

Type in the same directory name as the Trac installation. And check the Password-protect this dir option. In the text area, type in some username – password combinations according the format given. You should have something like this:

Set up Htaccess in Dreamhost Panel

Step 4:Getting Shell Access

Now, if you are like me, and haven’t used Dreamhost anything beyond FTP and some of the nifty features of the Panel, then welcome to the Shell Access for your host server. Basically, you’ll need to login into the server and run the ‘trac-admin’ program on the server and tell it to give you the Administrator rights, so that you can do those tasks through the web interface itself.

So, get yourself shell access by going into Manage Users on the toolbox, and then selecting a Shell Account (so that you can still ftp with that account).

Grant Shell Access to User

Step 5: Login with PuTTY

Now you’ll actually need to log in into the server. For this you need a program that can SSH, like PuTTY. Get it here.

PuTTY Configuration

Upon pressing Open, you should be connected to the host, and you’ll get a username/password request. This are the same details for the account you just changed the type to Shell for.

Step 5: Giving Administrator Rights

Now, you’ll need to give yourself administrator rights. The way this is done is by calling on the ‘trac-admin’ program to give so-and-so user the ‘TRAC_ADMIN’ permission right. Once you have that, you needn’t return to this dark place, and can use the web interface for most of the work that you require. Right, go ahead, type something like the following then:

trac-admin www.vishalkumar.in/tracme permission add vishal TRAC_ADMIN

Replace the www.vishalkumar.in/tracme with the exact address you asked the One Click Installer to install Trac into. Replace vishal with your username.

Giving yourself Administrator Rights

Running  the permission list command will show the current list of permissions.

Step 6: You’re Done!

Well, if you’ve reached this far, then you’ve managed to successfully installed Trac and Subversion, and created an Administrator for it, on Dreamhost. If you browse to your Trac site, you’ll be requested for a username and password (the one you just created in htaccess). You should see something like

Trac Web Interface

Here is my Inbox:

GMail Inbox

Here’s what I have in addition to the standard GMail Inbox:

• A Planet Theme (as you can see with the orange planet thing behind GMail)
• A extra side panel containing Multiple Inboxes, or different views of my mail
• Integrated Google Calender
• Integrated Google Docs

To get these and more activated in your GMail account, you will need the following:

• A GMail Account. If you don’t already have one, get it at Gmail.com

That about it.

Now, click on settings in the top right corner, and you’ll get something like:

GMail Settings

First of all, click on the tab that says Labs, and you’ll get the same screen as the one above. You’ll need to Enable the Labs features, after which its a good idea to refresh GMail.

You’ll see a lot of various options in this area, for enabling or disabling various Lab features.

Here, scroll down and find Multiple Inboxes. You can also enable Google Calender Gadget, Google Docs Gadget, and for those of you with slower internet speed, enable GMail Inbox Preview (first covered here).

GMail Inbox Preview

Once you’ve saved the changes, you need to click on the Multiple Inboxes tab link. Here, you can set the number of side inboxes you want, along with what kind of emails you want to show there. I highly recommend that you put ‘is:starred ‘ as one of the search strings. Basically this will have one of your Multiple Inboxes showing only the mails that you have starred. This way, you can put a star on an important email, and have it appear on the side of your main page.

Another feature I like about Gmail is purely cosmetic. I’m talking of course, about the Themes. I have the Planets theme installed, which looks really pretty, and also changes in image according to the time of the place you are in.

You can click on the themes tab and select a theme of your choice. Pepples is really good too.

GMail Themes

Anyway, these are just some of the basic GMail features that I have enabled on my GMail. I find that it looks way more interesting than before, and having links to my calender, docs, and starred mails right there in my main inbox saves a lot of time hunting down stuff. Check it out.

Have any other cool GMail trick? Comment it down.

I was just asked to look up the dates for, well, the GRE, so I did.

Then I wondered if it would the last of such request that I might get.

And hey, I had a semi-permanent place to post things, now didn’t I?

Anyways, click to read after the jump for the screenshot images (all neatly photoshopped), of the available dates for the GRE exam in Hyderabad and Kolkata, for the rest of 2009

Here are the dates for GRE in Hyderabad:

GRE Dates for Hyderabad, 2009

And for Kolkata:

GRE Dates for Kolkata, 2009

Go ahead, share it with your friends. And remember, I’m not responsible if those dates get booked, the timings are off, or if your pet chocked because it read my blog.

Another thing, the GRE General Exam costs $180, or around Rs.8,500. Wow. Paying that amount just makes you want to study harder, doesn’t it?

Check out www.gre.org for more info. Cheers.

Update:

GRE Hyderabad Dates