Kubuntu Upgrade?

Well, now that I have finally upgraded the Mac, and moved my apps to it, I finally found time to flatten the Ubuntu machine, and install Kubuntu. Why you ask? Shouldn’t I just download the KDE stuff by sudo apt-get install kubuntu-desktop? Let’s just say that there were things that made me want to flatten it. The main reason was that Evolution would crash every time I launched it. I think that over the course of time a dependancy got out of whack and the desktop sometimes doesn’t work right. Gnome flaky-ness is what got me started messing with KDE. Now KDE isn’t 100% stable. Moving on…

I downloaded the 5.04 Kubuntu ISO, burned it on my Mac, and then booted the Aria machine from the CD. Things were going well, and I saw the screens flash by. All was going well. Then I got a Red screen indicating that some packages could not install. I guess something was wrong with the ISO/Burn/CDRW and it was having trouble reading some of the packages. No biggie.. I let it continue, it finishes, and I am now at a login screen. I login, open up sources.list for apt, and comment out the CD, and then run synaptic (text version) and install all the packges from the net. The machine reboots and all is well! The machine is up and running. I do a quick apt-get for mozilla-firefox and I am good to go.

BUT

I have the Mac on a Dell 2005FP and I have the Aria machine on a matching 2005FP next to the mac. As I am bouncing around in KDE, I realize that the interface is so ugly. I like Gnome pretty well, but KDE is quicker and more useful. Next thing you know, I power down the Kubuntu machine, and hop back on my Mac. I am just taken with the UI in OS X. Before my Mac, I would be ok in KDE or Gnome, but now I’m spoiled. So far, for me, there are no UIs that are worthy in the “Free” Space. Windows and OS X are so much more refined that it is hard to go back. I guess that I may have a machine for sale soon

Let me know if you are interested in the specs

The switch!

Now that I have my cool Mac Mini running, it is time to get some stuff up and hosted on it. I decded to host this blog and the photogallery on the mini. Sounds simple enough right? I mean, I already have the WordPress blog configured, and the gallery is also configured and working correctly…

Apache

The first goal was to get Apache running and serving up pages. I was previously running Apache 2.x and have never worked with Apache 1.3. In looking over the system, I quickly realized that Apache is installed on a OS X machine, and it is version 1.33 (if you have all the latest Tiger updates). Checking the web, I realize that 1.33 is pretty current, so I go with it. I take a peek at the httpd.conf and see many similarities to 2.x. I configure the necessary settings to enable PHP. A few mintues later Apache’s default page is served up on my other machines. So far so goood!

MySQL

Next, I venture over to MySQL’s wesite and found this information. From the chart, I see that I should download 4.1.10a for Tiger 10.4. I go to the download page and click on the 4.1 section and find that The version available to download is 4.1.13. I download the package and get it all installed. I also downloaded the MyQLAdmin tool so that I can use a GUI tool to do some admin stuff.

At this stage I decide to do a backup on my Ubuntu machine. I backed up the old wordpress database to a file. I then copied the backup over to the Mac Mini, in preparation to restore it to the new database. That all sounds goood conceptually. But I quickly realize that running a restore is not creating a new schema even though I have the check box checked. After trying a few different things (that made no difference), I decided on a new plan. The new plan was to install WordPress fresh and figure out how to get the data restored later.

I downloaded the WordPress package, and got it situated on the hard drive where I wanted it, and I updated Apache to look in the new directory. I also used the VirtualHost directive since I will be hosting 2 different sites on the mini. I started walking through the WordPress 5 mintue install script, and after I modified the config file to have the correct database connection information, I gave it a try. I instantly received an error page that said it is unable to connect to the database. At this stage I take a moment to reflect on what i have configured, and proceed to check over alll the settings. Not finding anything abnormal, I decide to create a different user in MySQL and assign more permissions, choose a simpler password, and change a few other settings. No matter what I did, I couldn’t seeem to get WordPress to connect to the database. I verify settings another 10 times with MySqlAdmin and even log in with the database credentials via MySQLAdmin correctly, but WordPress refuses to connect.

I take a moment to regroup and I perform some queries in Google. I quickly come across another person’s blog where they mention in passing that there is a compatibity issue with WordPress and MySQL 4.1. MySQL 4.0 works correctly, but the new security settings in 4.1 cause the issue. Huh?? Once I have this information, I quickly discover that this is a common issue, and that there is a workaround. The workaround is to modify the my.cnf file and add the single line:

old-passwords

I restarted Apache, and MySQL for good measure. Would you know that a few more clicks through the WordPress wizard and I now have a working blog, although lacking my blog data.

Now, I return my attention to restoring the backup that I made on the Ubuntu machine. I have done a lot of SQL Server 2000 backups and restores and have an idea how it *SHOULD* work. I attempt to restore again and notice that WordPress is not picking up the restored data. In one of the many attempts to get this restored, I notice that there is a check box in MySQLAdmin that says “ignore SQL errors”. Do I want to ignore errors? Let’s give it a whirl. Now the restore takes a bit longer, and then …. My data is back! I give the blog pages a once over and notice that some things were missing. Like the blog title, any blog categories I had previously setup and default the blogroll was still present without my personal links I created. I easily created the new categories, and assigned the blogs to the new categories. Lastly, I created the link to the photoalbum and all was complete. After all this, my blog was now officially hosted on the mac mini. On to the Gallery!

Gallery
Whoa! It is getting late. I mean early! I have a feeling of acomplishment that I got the blog moved, and I was at that point where I could have easily went to bed and worked on the gallery another night. I thought to myself, the gallery is “self contained” in a directory and no database connectvity to contend with… This should go quicker. Famous last words. I connected to my Ubuntu machine and copied over all the data. I configured Apache for another VirtuaHost and attempted to connect. Nothing. Seems that directory permissions were way wrong. Once I got that all straightened out, I attempted to load the page again. I got some interesting errors. Colorful and all The errors were indicating it couldn’t create some information in a path that it is not installed to, and doesn’t exist. It was icking up the old location it was installed to on the Ubuntu machine. When I copied the data from the Ubuntu machine to the Mac Mini, I changed the location on the drive. Gallery doesn’t like this. I modified the config files and found all the places that needed to be updated. Once I figured that out, the photoalbum was served up nicely. All done? Of course not! I recalled that my wife wanted some new pictures to be uploaded. I thought “Hey, since I am here and it’s working great, let’s see how the mac does importing the pics.” That is when I figured out that OS X is missing some jpeg manipulation packages. To make a long search story short, I ended up finding the jpeg packages that would work. It wasn’t straight forward, and it appeared that one of the main sites that hosted the packages was down for maintenace or something. I found them elsewhere, and got it working. Now that it is working, I did a quick performance test and found that the Mac Mini is lacking a bit of horse power. The mini works great for a lot of tasks, but when it comes to crunching pictures, it took substantially longer than my Ubuntu machine. The Ubuntu box is a P4 2.4 Ghz with SATA drives, so it should be faster. I was just hopeful that somehow those guys at Apple figured out how to magically obtain better performance out of slower hardware. Not so, but it is plenty fast for most any task, even serving up a blog and picture gallery

Could it happen?

I read an interesting article this morning. It seems that anyone that follows the tech industry always has an opinion on how to make the future better. This article seems to think that if Microsoft released an Open Source operating system (not windows, but a *nix type OS) it would somehow pull in more people than it already has. It also implies that developers would abandon *Linux* in favor of it’s version.

I see where the author is going, but it is clear that he totally does not understand the ecosystem that exists in software industry. For one, who is going to pay those devs that are currently getting paid? I mean, sure there are plenty of people out there that contribute to open source projects that don’t receive money. But that is a minority in the computer industry. Did anyone read that the US is not graduating as many Computer Science graduates any more? Did anyone check with potential candidates to figure out why? It’s because people spend a lot of money for their education, and then they want to get a paying job to pay for their education loans. Or even more selfish reasons… They want kewl stuff and need a job that affords them the stuff.

The other ecosystem out there is all the ISV’s that ride on top of Windows with their apps. If anything Microsoft has always been a platform for others to build on. Sure they have put some things in the OS, but as most techs know, they are barebones, and if you want the real features you go to an ISV for a full featured product. Sure some of the included apps work well, but companies rarely use them. Take backup for instance. Microsoft includes the backup program (that was really not even developed by MS) and includes it in the OS. Do people rely on that for the Enterprise? How about SMORG’s? Home users? Of those I listed, home users *MAY* use it. However, it is an antiquated approach to taking a backup. The Enterprise and SMORG’s typically buy a backup solution.

Back to the daydream article. It seems that people mistake Open Source with free. That has really confused most people. People think that since some Open Source products are free, that all of them *SHOULD* be free. The idea that people do all this work, and then *shouldn’t* charge for it is very odd to me. I mean, that is the whole dynamic powering the music trading networks. Seems as though people don’t want to pay for music either.

You know, I don’t like to pay for stuff either. We all want stuff to be free. However, if your company decided to stop paying you, but still wants you to come to work, how motivated would you be?

People need money to pay for food, shelter, and water. When that changes, we will have other topics to discuss.

Worpress upgraded to 1.5.1.3

Upgraded due to the XML-RPC vulnerability.

Blog import complete

I just finished extracting the rest of my blog from PolarBlog. I now have my complete blog online from December 8th 2004. It took a little bit of time, but with WordPress’s simple UI, it was quick to cut and paste, and then edit the publish date. Pretty kewl!

Working on photos..

I am working to migrate the photogalleries out of Community Server and back in to my gallery on linux. That should be done soon. I am liking WordPress!

update: photos migrated.

Another post.

Well, after trying to switch to Community Server on my Windows machine, I just never felt really comfortable with it. Maybe in a while. For now, it is back to the Linux machine, and time to get my blogs back over here. I was using PolarBlog. Now I am trying our WordPress. Last time I tried WordPress they were at 1.2. I had some trouble with it, but so far so good with this version!

WordPress is back!

The initial blog on wordpress.

Hoary Hedgehog!

Last night I upgraded to the Horay Hedgehog release of Ubuntu. The instructions were pretty simple. Change the sources.list to point to Hoary rather than Warty, and then use apt-get to do a dist-upgrade. The download took some time, and then it installed. Once done I rebooted to load the new kernel. There are only a couple of things that don’t work right. gDesklets and Evolution don’t seem to work. Evolution couldn’t log into my gmail account or connect to my Exchange server. I may remove it and then re-install to test. I haven’t had any time to research the errors. As for a change? I noticed that the fonts seem to look better. One thing that I was surprised about is that it kept my multimon settings and booted up just fine. I downloaded the Kubuntu live CD so that i can check it out on my laptop. I want to see what all the fuss is about. I am not a huge KDE fan, but I will take a peek.

More to come…

New Nvidia Video Card.

Tonight I have some free time to play with my new toys. I purchased a new Dell 2001FP 20″ Flat panel monitor. I bought this because it was on sale and I wanted to play with dual monitors in Ubuntu. Once the monitor arrived, I scooted out to the local CompUsa to pick up an Nvidia FX 5500 128 MB AGP card. The built in video on my ASUS P4P800-VM is the Intel 82865G chipset and not a contender for my objective. I chose to pick up a video card locally in case I had some technical problems. That way I can return it easily. I was sucessful at getting the card installed in my small Antec Aria case. Once that was installed, I booted up Ubuntu and as expected, the X server wouldn’t start. I spent a lot of time reading and downloading the drivers from NVidia. I started to follow the instructions here but I realized that this was leading to re-compiling the kernel. That just didn’t seem like the road I wanted to go down, so I tried some ls other ways. The first thing I did was just setup the XF86Config-4 file like all the nvidia drivers were installed. That failed. I then did an apt-get install nvidia-glx nvidia-glx-dev. That seemed to do the trick. That allows the x server to start, but I want dual monitors. I looked around and found that xinerama was the ticket. I played with it for a while and noticed that some other people found that the TwinView option was better. I put in the settings and boom! I am dual monitor linux dude! I found one trick wallpaper that is 3200×1200 so it is across both monitors.

What did I learn? That is take 10 times as long to get multi-mon working under Linux than it does for Windows. Phew! But that is part of the fun! Just glad that it is easy to search these days