Adventures & experiences in contemporary technology
One of the benefits of running Linux is the availability of virtual desktops and installing VirtuaWin was the only way to get the same functionality in Windows before the launch of Windows 10. For reasons known to Microsoft, they decided against the same sort of implementation as seen in Linux or UNIX. Instead, they put the virtual desktop functionality a click away and rather hides it from most users unless they know what clicking on the Task View button allows. The approach also made switching between desktops slower with a mouse. However, there are keyboard shortcuts that addresses this once multiple virtual desktops exist.
Using WIN+CTRL+LEFT or WIN+CTRL+RIGHT does this easily once you have mastered the action. Depending on your keyboard setup, WIN is the Windows, Super or Command key while CTRL is the Control key. Then, LEFT is the left arrow key and RIGHT is the right arrow key. For machines with smaller screens where multi-tasking causes clutter, virtual desktops are a godsend for organising how you work and having quick key combinations for switching between them adds to their utility.
Seeing Arch Linux running so solidly in a VirtualBox virtual box has me contemplating whether I should have it installed on a real PC. Saying that, recent announcements regarding the implementation of GNOME 3 in Linux Mint have caught my interest even if the idea of using a rolling distribution as my main home operating system still has a lot of appeal for me. Having an upheaval come my way every six months when a new version of Linux Mint is released is the main cause of that.
While remaining undecided, I continue to evaluate the idea of Arch Linux acting as my main OS for day-to-day home computing. Towards that end, I have set up a working web server instance on there using the usual combination of Apache, Perl, PHP and MySQL. Of these, it was MySQL that went the least smoothly of all because the daemon wouldn’t start for me.
It was then that I started to turn to Google for inspiration and a range of actions resulted that combined to give the result that I wanted. One problem was a lack of disk space caused by months of software upgrades. Since tools like it in other Linux distros allow you to clear some disk space of obsolete installation files, I decided to see if it was possible to do the same with pacman, the Arch Linux command line package manager. The following command, executed as root, cleared about 2 GB of cruft for me:
pacman -Sc
The S in the switch tells pacman to perform package database synchronization while the c instructs it to clear its cache of obsolete packages. In fact, using the following command as root every time an update is performed both updates software and removes redundant or outmoded packages:
pacman -Syuc
So I don’t forget the needful housekeeping, this will be what I use in future with the y being the switch for a refresh and the u triggering a system upgrade. It’s nice to have everything happen together without too much effort.
To do the required debugging that led me to the above along with other things, I issued the following command:
mysqld_safe --datadir=/var/lib/mysql/ &
This starts up the MySQL daemon in safe mode if all is working properly and it wasn’t in my case. Nevertheless, it creates a useful log file called myhost.err in /var/lib/mysql/. This gave me the messages that allowed the debugging of what was happening. It led me to installing net-tools and inettools using pacman; it was the latter of these that put hostname on my system and got the MySQL server startup a little further along. Other actions included unlocking the ibdata1 data file and removing the ib_logfile0 and ib_logfile1 files so as to gain something of a clean sheet. The kill command was used to shut down any lingering mysqld sessions too. To ensure that the ibdata1 file was unlocked, I executed the following commands:
mv ibdata1 ibdata1.bad
cp -a ibdata1.bad ibdata1
These renamed the original and then crated a new duplicate of it with the -a switch on the cp command forcing copying with greater integrity than normal. Along with the various file operations, I also created a link to my.cnf, the MySQL configuration file on Linux systems, in /etc using the following command executed by root:
ln -s /etc/mysql/ my.cnf /etc/my.cnf
While I am unsure if this made a real difference, uncommenting the lines in the same file that pertained to InnoDB tables. What directed me to these were complaints from mysqld_safe in the myhost.err log file. All I did was to uncomment the lines beginning with “innodb” and these were 116-118, 121-122 and 124-127 in my configuration file but it may be different in yours.
After all the above, the MySQL daemon ran happily and, more importantly, started when I rebooted the virtual machine. Thinking about it now, I believe that was a lack of disk space, the locking of a data file and the lack of InnoDB support that was stopping the MySQL service from running.Running commands like mysqld start weren’t yielding useful messages so a lot of digging was needed to get the result that I needed. In fact, that’s one of the reasons why I am sharing my experiences here.
In the end, creating databases and loading them with data was all that was needed for me to start see functioning websites on my (virtual) Arch Linux system. It turned out to be another step on the way to making it workable as a potential replacement for the Linux distributions that I use most often (Linux Mint, Fedora and Ubuntu).
One matter that really came to light was how well or not the pages on here and on my hill walking and photography website came out on the printed page. After spotting a WordPress Codex article and with an eye on making things better, I have made a distinction between screen and print stylesheets. The code in the XHTML looks like this:
<link rel=”stylesheet” href=”/style.css” type=”text/css” media=”screen” />
<link rel=”stylesheet” href=”/style_print.css” type=”text/css” media=”print” />
The media attribute seems to be respected by the browsers that I have been using for testing (latest versions of Firefox, MSIE and Opera) so it then was a matter of using CSS to control what was shown and how it was displayed. Extraneous items like sidebars were excluded from the printed page in favour of the real content that visitors would be wanting anyway and everything else was made as monochrome as possible with images being the only things to escape. After all, people don’t want to be wasting paper and ink in this cash strained times and there’s no need to have any more colour than necessary either. Then, there’s the distraction caused by non-functioning hyperlinks that has inspired the sharing of some wisdom on A List Apart. Returning to my implementation, please let me know in the comments what you think of what I have done on here and if there remains any room for improvement.