Lenz Grimmer's blog

Some of you may remember a GUI tool named MySQLFront written by Ansgar Becker, a shareware tool for Windows to administrate a MySQL server. The development stopped with version 2.5 in September 2002, because Ansgar no longer had the time to further drive the development. About a year later, the name (not the code) was taken over by Nils Hoyer, who started to develop and sell a product similar in functionality under that name. See this page (in german) for a more detailed history.

Back then, many people had asked Ansgar to turn his work into an Open Source project, which he declined to do (as it would probably have required even more time to maintain properly than just doing the development all by himself).

The good news is that Ansgar revised his decision now: HeidiSQL is the new name of his GUI tool (based on the original MySQLFront 2.5 code base), which has now been released under the GPL! The Delphi/Kylix source code is now available via the SourceForge SVN, new binaries will be released shortly (a few bug fixes have already been applied). A discussion forum is available, too.

I'd like to congratulate Ansgar to this step - I am sure that there are still many enthusiasts of the "old" MySQLFront around that will be excited to learn about this new development. All the best for your project and thanks for enriching the Open Source ecosystem around MySQL!

I looked through the results of the 2006 SourceForge.net Community Choice Awards and was very happy to see that phpMyAdmin came out first in the Database and SysAdmin categories. Congratulations to Marc Delisle and the rest of the phpMyAdmin team!

phpMyAdmin will actually be showcasing their project in the DotOrg Pavilion at our MySQL Users Conference, taking place April 24-27 in Santa Clara, California. One more reason to not miss this event!

The JAX Innovation Award is intended to honour and recognise the most remarkable and outstanding European contributions in the world of Java and Eclipse. These contributions can include products, open source projects, ideas, concepts, publications, or break-through technological innovations. What's your most favourite innovation or project?

You can submit your proposal online or by downloading and filling out forms provided from this page. The winner can win a 10kEUR prize, which will be presented during the JAX, Enterprise Architecture, and Eclipse Forum Europe conferences, which all take place in parallel on May 8th-12th in Wiesbaden, Germany.

End of last week SUSE announced the release 10.1 Beta9 and that they decided to postpone the release candidate to iron out the last outstanding issues. I have high respect for this move and would like to congratulate them for making this undoubtedly hard and unpopular decision. I've been running Beta8 on my laptop since last week and things are looking very promising. I reported a number of bugs which almost all have been resolved in the meanwhile - from my perspective I would be happy if at least the following two bugs could be resolved before the release candidate is made:

• BUG#159595 - Can't change CDs when using YaST2 in KDE (it surprises me that nobody else seems to be stumbling over this one)
• BUG#159667 - Postfix SASL authentication fails with "no mechanism available" (this one was actually a problem with AppArmor preventing Postfix from accessing the required libraries)

For a change, I decided to not download the full ISO images but rather just got the delta-iso files via BitTorrent. These deltas are all one needs to create the full ISOs - the download was blazingly fast, too. I had already deleted the Beta8 ISO images from my hard disk, but still had the previously burned Beta8 CDs. To generate functional Beta9 ISOs, I just needed to install the package deltarpm. After inserting CD1 of Beta8 in the CD-ROM drive I used the following command to generate CD1 of the Beta9 CD set:

applydeltaiso /dev/hdc SUSE-Linux-10.1-beta8_beta9-i386-CD1.delta.iso SUSE-Linux-10.1-beta9-i386-CD1.iso

The process is a bit CPU-intensive, but resulted in a functional ISO image - even the MD5 checksum matched the one from the full ISOs available for download. I repeated this process for all 5 CDs and burned them over the Beta8 CDs (I have a set of 5 CD-RWs just for SUSE beta-testing). Let's see when I find a moment to perform another test installation... So far, the list of most annoying bugs mostly mentions issues related to the package installer - this seems to be one of the sore spots of SUSE Linux 10.1... I hope they manage to beat it into shape in time.