Wrestling with the CentOS ref platform and configurations

Today was supposed to be "learn all about unit tests" day and instead it was "configure CentOS until you drop" day.

Here's what I was working with:
Ref Platform VM (CentOS-5.0)
Ref Platform set up instructions
Install scripts that are supposed to help make it all much easier

So the day looked a little like this:

* Wrestling with Python for about 2 hours - after much trial and error with the python path I ended up deleting my messed up ref platform vm, and starting up a clean one. The install scripts caused a clean VM with a python version of 2.5.1 to become a busted, can't finish make, 2.4.3 version. What?!

* Scrap the scripts, instead follow the instructions as above from the wiki. This brought up a couple of issues. First of all, all the versions on the wiki are a lot older than the ones in the install scripts. With a clean VM you first have to set a symbolic link to gcc-4.1.1 otherwise compiling zope-interface will not work:

ln -s /tools/gcc-4.1.1 /tools/gcc

Now the steps for installing zope-interface work fine. However there is an issue where every time a symbolic link is created, a symbolic link is then also created inside of the symbolic link as a link back to the original item. This is extremely confusing - I just deleted the broken links without looking too deeply into why that was happening. It happened with zope-interface and the twisted/twistedcore.

There are also a few spelling errors in the wiki for the PATH settings, I'll go in an change those soon.

Now that I am trying to write down what happened, all the glitches seem minor. I swear there was a lot of "Why is this happening?" and studying PATH, PYTHONPATH and PYTHONHOME to see if they were configured properly.

Probably the next step is to study those scripts and see how they can be more easily run on the VM anytime, anywhere because right now - they are hit and miss.

Google search FTW

Here's reason 1,000,001 why I love the internet:

The VMware Fusion Windows XP vm is pretty important to daily life for me and today it decided to hang. Halfway through a "Restoring Virtual Machine State", the progress bar just stopped moving and I had to force quite Fusion. After many restarts, and other experimenting, I was starting to worry that I was in for a long Saturday of re-creating an XP vm instead of working on a job I'm doing.

Instead, a quick Google search for "restoring virtual machine state hangs fusion" turned up this little nugget of wisdom that I bet will come in handy again someday for me, and maybe for anyone else out there who also depends heavily on Fusion.

Go to ~/Documents/Virtual Machine right click on the .vmwarevm that is causing the issue, right click on it and "Show package contents" then delete the .vmss file.

This gets rid of the session state and when you restart the vm it will boot up as if it was not saved in mid session.

Lose the session, no biggie - lose the vm...well that would be much much worse, right?