Tag Archives: ubuntu

Setting Up Pretty Permalinks In WordPress 2.5.1 and Ubuntu 7

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Cause I’ll forget later

  • Install WordPress
  • Get Shell Access
  • in the blog’s root
    • touch .htaccess
    • sudo chmod 666 .htaccess
    • Edit said .htaccess fle and add the following
      • Options +FollowSymLinks
  • in /etc/apache2/sites-available
    • edit the file called default
    • Line 12 should read AllowOverride All
  • do sudo apache2 -k restart
  • Log into the blog, and set up your Pretty Permalinks desires.

Note To Self: This procedure may be incorrect. You modified so much crap trying to figure it out that you probably Christmas-Tree’d the server…

I love Ubuntu

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The software is stellar. It is my favorite web server platform, period. It’s fast. It’s reliable. It blows all other Linux distros out of the water for personal style web serving and desktop Linux use. Well, in my opinion.

The LAMP server has almost everything you need ready to go from the start. Getting a Wiki or WordPress blog running out of the box is a piece of cake. No, easier than cake. It’s like breathing. Yes. Serving pages with Ubuntu is like breathing.

The community support is excellent. If I have a problem with Ubuntu, all I have to do is type, even vaguely, a 5 word description of my problem or even just the task I want to accomplish, and someone out there has had the same problem and had it fixed by a Linux or Ubuntu guru.

I Ubuntu.

Armada 7800 Project: Phase 2

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After running the installation all night, the system is up and running Ubuntu 7.10 desktop. On login it said something about being unable to start the Gnome Settings . .. something. Didn’t write it down. Too lazy. Will fix it later.

It detects the network card, which is good. It doesn’t detect the sound card, which is almost bad. Just more stuph to have fun fixing!

The machine has somewhere around 190MB of RAM. An odd number, to say the least. Top says it’s 190944k, but that doesn’t come out to anything even. (186.46875 MB? Weird shared RAM amount?) It takes about 20 seconds to bring up a terminal. I think the hard drive is failing .. . or just slow as molasses. Could be because the memory load is somewhere around 98%. Maybe I can find some more RAM and a faster Hard Drive for free laying around somewheres.

EDIT: Ripped open the machine: it has 1x 128MB PC100 SODIMM and 1x 32MB PC100 SODIMM. With 32MB onboard we get 192. Close enough for me.

Armada 7800 Project: Phase 1

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So, I got this Compaq Armada 7800 as a toy to play with. I figured I would put Ubuntu on it, just to see if I could.

Machine has a Pentium II, some unknown amount of RAM (haven’t been motivated enough to find out yet), a 5GB hard drive and had Windows 2000.

The CD-ROM drive is failing and does not read burned CD’s well. I tried several times with a couple of different discs to get Ubuntu 7.10 desktop installed, but ran into multiple problems, including disk read errors and weird failure at 15% while “detecting file systems”.

I am now trying the ALT CD instead, and it seems to be doing a better job, but because the drive keeps doing the “I am a very stupid CD-ROM and I am going to keep speeding up and slowing down even though I have done so 20 times and I should already know that I can’t read this disk at full speed, but let me just try one more time…” problem, it is being slow about things. Oh, did I mention it’s a Pentium II? *meh*

I don’t really have any use for this machine in a practical sense, but I am curious if I can get it running a “modern” operating system. I like a challenge….

Upgraded the Wiki Box

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I upgraded the wikibox today. I replaced the old PIII 800 machine with an Athlon XP running in the 1650 area. I decided to do this instead of using the Athlon machine as a render client, since it really doesn’t have the horsepower to do so. I want to eventually replace the Hard Drive in the wikibox with something faster to increase responsiveness.

The upgrade was easy and not easy. Unlike Windows and their fascist “copy protection asshat HAL kernel sh*t”, you can change the hardware on an Ubuntu box rather easily without tripping some kind of Gestapo alarm or basically causing the whole operating system to puke blue chunks. I just yanked the hard drive from the old machine and popped it into the new one and it just booted up and ran. I did have a couple of problems, however.

May I take this opportunity to say that the X Windowing system sucks. It’s settings are hardcoded into a fuc**ng text file and if you change the video hardware, oops sorry, you don’t get a GUI. It does not have any kind of automatic fallback mode, so if you change your video hardware and you don’t have any experience with the command line, you are basically screwed. Secondly, I think GNU/Linux really needs to create an X Windows compatible API that is BUILT INTO THE FUC**NG KERNEL, just like EVERY OTHER MODERN OPERATING SYSTEM. Maybe then graphics on Linux would not be slow, buggy and generally crufty crap.

Back to the story: I had to do some guessing and hacking and a couple “sudo -reconfigure dpkg-xserver-xorg” commands to get the video running. Then, to my surprise, the network card did not work. Running a “lspci” command showed that the OS knew the card was there, and some other command starting in “mod” (that I found on a forum somewheres) told me the driver was installed, but eth0 was just not up and could not be brought up with “ifup eth0″.

After about 2 hours of forum hunting and getting nowhere, I finally stumbled across a bit of nice detective work. Apparently, Ubuntu’s network software, also, sucks. If your network card changes, it will not automatically reconfigure your configuration files and just make it work. Oh no. You have to hand code “/etc/iftab” to match your new card’s MAC address. THEN and ONLY THEN wil eth0 come up. What if you aren’t intimately familiar with linux and/or you aren’t a hardware geek and don’t know how to get the MAC address of your network card? Again, you would be completely screwed.

What a pain in the ass! Well, at least I didn’t have to reinstall the Operating System. On XP, it’s nothing more than a minor irritation: a quick repair install and phone reactivation and you are up and running. Vista, however, is a totally different story. You CANNOT repair install it. You have to completely replace the OS, reinstall all your software and drivers from scratch, and put all your data back.

I guess what I am saying is, VISTA BLOWS.