We're gonna work on an open-source application called Telescope which is developed and maintained by Seneca College open-source community in the remaining of this semester. This week's lab is a start for students to set up the environment and get familiar with the application.
It took me a while to set up the environment. Thanks to the PRs I did in Hacktoberfest, I'm getting used to facing difficulties while setting up the environment for application development. The first difficulty I encountered was low disk space, as I mentioned in the previous experience using docker, I knew installing docker engine and running dockerized application are going to occupy at least 2 GB disk space. It is hard for me to free up the spaces anymore. Therefore, I decided to re-partition my hard drive!
My OS is Linux 19.2 Tina, my disk partitions were 20 GB for / and about 350 GB for /home. I planned to shrink the partition of /home and increase the / partition. I was trying to use a GUI tool called GParted. However, I found that I wasn't able to unmount the /home which means I wasn't able to make any changes on that partition including resizing and moving. I searched for similar issues' posts on different forums, and I got the conclusion that I have to be not using any process in /home to unmount the partition. According to those posts on different forums, there should be several ways to achieve it. I've tried some of them, but they did not work. I ended up using GParted live USB.
The instructions are quite clear. After 3 hours (most of them are waiting time), I finally got my drive re-partitioned and got a bigger partition for /! Hooray!
The rest of setting up environment for Telescope was smooth, the document is quite useful. However, the steps of installing docker might not work on Linux Mint OS. I had this issue while I installed docker by following the steps from the official docker website. I got the solution from some posts in the Linux Mint forum. I'll spend some time to truly figure it out and send the conclusion to the Telescope community and discuss if we should update the document.
The lab for this week is to use the link checker tool with Telescope. Telescope will return the latest 10 posts with their ids and URLs. Our mission is to use the link checker to check these URLs. What I did to achieve the goal were to fetch the data from the localhost, downloading the string and convert it to JSON objects to access the URL properties, and finally, check the links.
Looking forward to working on Telescope in the upcoming weeks! It is impressed that this project was built by previous students in this course. Can't wait to be part of it.
Top comments (0)