Harsh J

Sure is easy to get the Cloudera hadoop packages up and running in Debian and RPM based distributions. All you need to do is add repositories and issue an instruction to your package manager!

Since ArchLinux, distribution of choice for the wise, rollin’ and version-worry-free, has no AUR packages for installing the same I thought I might entertain you to a more manual approach of setting up your Cloudera Hadoop and running the beautiful Cloudera Desktop on it. Well actually the article caters to almost any other Linux too, but I love ArchLinux and like getting sued. Anyway, lets get on with it.

Took me a couple of minutes to hunt down the archive site of Cloudera which gave away source packages (not source rpms, those wouldn’t be what we need, at least not what I need). You can find the Cloudera’s CDH2 releases here. Navigate above and away for other releases if you want to grow older or to bleed till you feel like stemming it.

Download their Hadoop and Desktop archives (Versions 0.20.1 and 0.3.0 as of this article’s writing date).

Unpack Cloudera-Hadoop and configure as you like, format the namenode, and run it using provided bin/ scripts. Configuring help may be found on Hadoop’s site.

Unpack Cloudera-Desktop and build it using make, install using make install (use a PREFIX if you like). Next, follow this article (from 1.5 on) (README of the desktop package helps too) to pour special sauce into Cloudera-Hadoop for the Desktop to integrate smoothly. Run the desktop using cloudera-desktop/bin/supervisor (This runs a server-like process, so ensure you don’t SIGTERM it — start within screen or with a &).

Connect to your (hopefully working if Hadoop) new Cloudera Desktop using http://localhost:8088 and enjoy using the simple Job Designer tool, amongst others.

I leave the daemon user-setup and other finer cluster-related tuning to your tastes. This guide serves good for a pseudo cluster, $HOME run setup.

Polishing your K Desktop never seems to stop. First its the Desktop appearances, the plethora of widgets available to choose and use from for the desktop and the taskbar, the hilighting schemes in Kate/KWrite, it keeps going on. Maybe a bad thing – you never settle.

I was trying out the kde-extragear-plasmoids AUR package yesterday on my ArchLinux’s plain KDE installation and I came across this wonderful plasmoid known as Smooth Tasks. While nothing innovative in itself, its a simple plasmoid that apes the Windows 7 taskbar. Provides icon views of the applications running and allows peeking into them when hovered upon, and if grouped – lets you switch using the previews. I’ll leave the screenshots to do the rest of explanation.

What I liked most about Windows 7 is its ability to color the hover-glow on the icons in the taskbar based on the average computed color of the icon itself. This feature, as explained by Long Zheng, “delivers some sentimental value by making it easy to identify applications by color.” I completely agree with that point. However, Smooth Tasks missed this feature, and the built in light feature didn’t move entirely with the mouse pointer as well.

I cloned the code today to add, at least an initial working version, the color hot-tracking to Smooth Tasks and it was done by the afternoon. I’ve pushed the changes to the Smooth Tasks fork over at Bitbucket (which is a great site, by the way) and the image below describes how the initial work looks like. Notice the soft color glow. Here are some more pictures, with other icons.

Color Hot-tracking in Smooth Tasks on KDE

Now all I’ve to figure out is a way to enhance the glow or another component of the effect to give it a more polished look. Windows 7 also colors the border of the taskbar item with the average color but that’s not possible with the way the KDE’s glow around items work, as far as I know. Please let me know if am wrong.