Putting it all on one line
9th March 2008One of the nice things about the Linux/UNIX command line is that you get the options of stringing together a number of commands on one line for submission of all for processing at one go. Separating them with && does the trick, but I noticed that semicolon delimitation worked as well. Here's a line that will install VMware for you in one fell swoop:
sudo apt-get install linux-headers-$(uname -r) build-essential gcc-3.4 && tar xzf VMware-workstation-6.0.2-59824.i386.tar.gz && export CC=/usr/bin/gcc-3.4 && cd vmware-distrib && sudo ./vmware-install.pl
Another trick is to direct the output of one command into another, like the following, which subsets a process listing:
ps -aux | grep "wine"
It's all good stuff and is the sort of thing that shows why so many Linux/UNIX types love their command line so much.
Alternatives to WordPress
26th February 2008Movable Type was the leading blogging platform before Six Apart disappointed their users with their licensing and WordPress came into being. Now that WordPress would seem to be king of the hill, it's tempting to conclude that there's nothing else out there for those wanting a self-hosted blog. In fact, nothing could be further from the truth.
These days, Movable Type is available as an open source entity and I have been giving it a quick whirl. Importing from a WordPress export file is very swish and a quick spot of tinkering gets you a running in no time. Getting the thing set up can be a little confusing because the processing is done by CGI scripts, and they need to live in your website's cgi-bin directory while the actual blog is instantiated in another location. Aside from that complexity, things are not that off-putting, and the style of the administration and content management dashboard could show WordPress a thing or two. It's partitioning of trackbacks from comments is another useful feature in this world pervaded by comment spam.
Habari is another option that I have encountered, and it seems like early days for this one. The first impression that struck me was its minimalist feel, but it will do most of what you ask of it when it comes to blogging. Nevertheless, importing and exporting is one area that needs more development and its handling of themes is a matter that warrants more exploration on my part. In summary, it seems to offer most of your needs, even if there is nothing to make it stand out from the crowd at this time.
I encountered another alternative platform in the pages of PC Plus called Expression Engine. It is commercial software, yet there is a free cut down version available without some of the modules. There is a bit more to the offering than blogging, but you have to buy it to get features like wikis, forums and the like. As it happens, the blogging capability in the free version is creditable, and it appears that you can manage multiple blogs through the same interface, a feature that has potential when it comes to using the software as a kind of CMS. It cannot directly import from WordPress, but a Movable Type export file is accepted without a bother. Regarding changing the look and feel of the blog, I found that editing the index and stylesheet files through the administration interface produced good results quite easily and quickly. Maybe creating a new theme might be a worthwhile project to see how one can make a blog's appearance fall into line with the other parts of a website. After all, Ellis Labs claims that the software should work the way that you do.
I only have done a quick spot of fiddling with any of the above, but there is potential for further investigations to see what else they have to offer. I am sure that there are other alternatives and the CMS Drupal comes to mind for its having a blogging module, even if I didn't find the main CMS functionality to be sufficiently flexible for my needs when I last tried it (a new version made it appearance recently); overly complex CSS was one bugbear for me. Even with all the possibilities, I won't be spending too much of my time exploring this area. Suffice it to say, it's not a completely WordPress world...
Keeping an eye on WordPress development II
22nd February 2008While I don't know if this might become a series, a sequel to an earlier post might be a sign of things to come. When I was pulling another version of WordPress from Subversion, I noted a lot of updated files coming through, more than usual. Curiosity led to my having a look and there have been a few obvious tweaks. The most noticeable of these is that the Plugins portlet was now active, making its role clearer.
The role? Apparently, it feeds a random selection of WordPress plugins from those included in WordPress.org's own listings. It might be useful or an annoying diversion, but we'll see what comes; it is not configurable for now. Otherwise, the admin screens look a little sharper, especially the ones for editing and managing content. I'll continue to await the arrival of the ability to apply admin screen themes: it's a "TODO" on the dashboard screen and could be interesting if it were to come about. We'll see...
Trying out Firefox 3 Beta 3 on Ubuntu
20th February 2008Keeping an eye on future browser releases helps to avoid any shocks when maintaining publicly available websites. Therefore, it should come as no surprise that I have been giving Firefox 3 a whirl. As it happens, I have had it going on both Windows and Ubuntu. With the former, I have not encountered any obvious problems, but I am wondering if the new bookmarking system will mean anything to me. For installation on Ubuntu, I used the following command (I think that I culled it from Tombuntu but can't remember offhand...):
wget -P ~ ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/firefox/releases/3.0b3/linux-i686/en-US/firefox-3.0b3.tar.bz2 && tar xjf ~/firefox-3.0b3.tar.bz2 -C ~
The nice thing about the above is that it places the test installation in your home directory and away from Firefox 2. It also works regardless of what Linux distribution you have. The profiles get shared between versions, so a backup would be a good idea before you start to tinker. As with the Windows version, page loading and rendering is faster in the new version, but I found a problem with printing that, I hope, will get sorted before the final release. Another area for attention is font rendering: it could be sharper for sans serif fonts on Ubuntu and serif fonts on Windows. Otherwise, it works well on both platforms and I like the way that open windows are saved on exit, an excellent idea carried over from Opera.
Keeping an eye on future WordPress releases
16th February 2008While I haven't mentioned WordPress in a while, it's now heading for version 2.5 after 2.4 was skipped. Because I want to ensure that upgrading doesn't cause problems for my blogs, I have been picking up nightly builds with Subversion from WordPress.org. The following is the command to be used, which it works fine on my Ubuntu system in the folder where I want the WordPress installation directory to live. If you wish to find out more about Subversion, there is a free book on the web.
svn co http://svn.automattic.com/wordpress/trunk/
The main event is the new dashboard, and that seems to be taking cues from Movable Type (I gave that a whirl recently, so I may say something here about it yet). Everything is still there, along with tantalising hints of prospects for customisation. In the interim, you can change the front page feeds so that they originate from other than the world of WordPress, not a bad thing given that I found WordPress Planet feeds were annoying often. Alternate theme support for the dashboard seems to be on the to-do list, as is something for plugins; we'll see what comes of the latter. Otherwise, nothing seems to be changed or, more importantly, broken, and I am able to get a mirror of my outdoors blog up and running with the only problems of any note coming from the new web address, not at all major. For now, I'll continue to keep tabs on what's happening; being forewarned of any future problems is a big bonus.
Update:
Recently, I found a good summary of what to expect on Blog Herald. This is one for a return visit, methinks.
O’Reilly does eBooks…
12th February 2008I have been a Safari subscriber for a while now, and access to O'Reilly titles has been the main reason behind it. However, I recently discovered that O'Reilly is offering full eBooks of some of its titles. Why the offering is far from complete, this is progress and the prospect of downloading complete books with proper page numbering and an index is an appealing. Previously, I was downloading the individual chapters from Safari and compiling the books in that way, a less than user-friendly approach. So, do I continue the Safari subscription or not?
VMware going amuck…
4th February 2008Over the last week, I have had VMware misreport the speed of my CPU and have virtual machines like they're on speed. To cure it, I tried restarting the PC a few times but that yielded no joy, even if it did work the last time that VMware did this on me. Following some instructions from the Ubuntu forums set things back onto an even keel again. The commands required follow:
sudo apt-get install linux-headers-$(uname -r) build-essential gcc-3.4
tar xzf VMware-workstation-6.0.2-59824.x86_64.tar.gz
export CC=/usr/bin/gcc-3.4 && cd vmware-distrib && sudo ./vmware-install.pl
The first of these adds in a specific version of the GNU C compiler while also adding kernel headers; the latter weren't needed on my system since I already had them. The second extracts the files from the tarball, while the last performs the required installation rites.
Windows Home Server: an interesting proposition?
29th January 2008If I was still running Windows as my main OS, the idea of storing my files on a separate computer acting as a server would appeal to me. After all, I rapidly developed the habit of partitioning my hard disk so that my data files were separated from the rough and tumble lives of operating system and software files. Later, I took it further by placing system files and data files on separate hard drives, an arrangement that smoothed my move to Linux. Separation of computers would further secure things, and that's why Windows Home Server caught my eye when it was released. The recent spate of glitches with the thing might have changed my mind, but my move to Ubuntu makes that irrelevant now. In any event, I suppose that I could have gone with Network-Attached Storage or an external hard rive. I do possess the latter, and a backup is being stored on it as I write this, and the former still remains an option but for the fact that I am happy with how things stand. In any event, the conventional networking model would be yet another potential choice. While I was going to say more about Windows Home Server, I think I'll leave that to others, so here's a library of links for your perusal.
Getting BBC iPlayer going on Ubuntu
27th January 2008Following on from my earlier musings on the subject, I finally have got the BBC's iPlayer going on my Ubuntu set up. To accomplish this, I needed to get my hands on the plug-in files nphelix.so and nphelix.xpt. Once that was done (more on how I did that later), I popped the former into /usr/lib/firefox/plugins, the latter into /usr/lib/firefox/components and restarted Firefox. I think that a system restart might have helped me too, even if it was done for another reason. The files themselves were culled from the RealPlayer folder populated by the installer (realplay-10.0.9.809-linux-2.2-libc6-gcc32-i586.bin was what I used) that I had downloaded from the Helix Community website; the plugin files were found in the mozilla subfolder under RealPlayer.
Another thing that I did was to fire Alacarte, Gnome's menu editor, and add Configuration Editor (also known as GConf, I believe) to the System tools submenu on the Applications menu. Once added to the menu, I fired up the said application. Navigating to desktop > gnome > url-handlers > rtsp, I changed the command to realplay "%s". While I don't know if this helps, it certainly was no hindrance and I got the result that I wanted and in high quality audio too.
Mucking about with WINE
25th January 2008It was the prospect of having Photoshop Elements going on Linux that got me thinking about working with WINE. The cause of that was Elements' inability to edit, create and save files to a VMware shared folder. As it turned out, there was more to my WINE adventures than getting Elements working. Because I was in learning mode, those adventures turned out to be messy ones, with WINE getting uninstalled and reinstalled a number of times. For the last of these, I forced matters by installing from a DEB package rather than going through Ubuntu's normal channels. The openSUSE journey was a bit more orderly, and that VM option remains if I want to go experimenting more.
Along the way, I got the Windows version of Opera going as a test. When trying out WINE in former times, I never tried installing applications into it like I do now. I don't know if this was because I hadn't made an important connection or that it was not the way that things used to be. Flushed with the success of Opera, I went further and discovered that Dreamweaver 8 and Altova's XMLSpy 2007 Professional work without my breaking a sweat. Photoshop Elements was another story and one that I have told before. Apple's iTunes was another thing that I tried without any success, even with a useful guide on Wine Reviews; for some reason, I'm having trouble getting the installation to complete successfully. I think that I'll leave my tinkering at that for now, but my general impression is that WINE works well these days, even if there is the odd crash or inexplicable disappearance of an application window. The latter happened with Dreamweaver and XMLSpy and I needed to log off and back on again to clear the slate for further progress.