Yes, after months weaiting for the big news to be released, Google have finally announced that the deskop / laptop / netbook operating system will be called Chrome OS, and it will be available soon.   Really we all new as soon as Google released Android that a pc operating system must have been in the pipeline. We suggested that they would called it GUnix, basing the OS on Unix, but they have chosen the build the Chrome brand.  “Google Chrome OS is a new project, separate from Android Android was designed from the beginning to work across a variety of devices from phones to set-top boxes to netbooks Google Chrome OS is being created for people who spend most of their time on the web, and is being designed to power computers ranging from small netbooks to full-size desktop systems. While there are areas where Google Chrome OS and Android overlap, we believe choice will drive innovation for the benefit of everyone, including Google.” Google official blog. Although full details of when it will be released or what it will be capable of doing have not been announced yet, it will certainly rival Windows 7, Apple’s OSX and the various [...]

I have recently been experimenting more with Linux (Ubuntu distribution) and have recently discovered the power of running Virtual Machines. I started investigating after it was suggested that the safest way to run Windows was inside a Virtual Machine running on Linux, as this helps to stop and contain viruses and Trojans. However, virtual boxes have many other advantages, such as testing different operating systems, different software in the same operating systems, or just keeping your most sensitive data totally separate from general use. Whether to run multiple OS’s for website testing, for increased security, or to run software dependent on OS without having 100 computers, everyone needs a VM or two running on their PC. So, how is it done? By far the easiest method is to install VirtualBox OSE in Ubuntu (a popular windows friendly Linux distribution). VirtualBox OSE can be installed using Ubuntu’s Synaptic Package Manager, which simply means, no command line required for the installation. You will need the command line to set it up, but just one line required. One it is set up, you simple create a new virtual machine, then chose what you are installing. All Windows are available from 3.1 to Windows [...]

I have a problem that I am struggling to resolve. When I convert a video recorded using my Sony Camcorder from MPG to FLV, using FFMPEG, I lose the sound. I have done a little reading, and am currently struggling to fix this problem, but I think that is has something to do with some sound codecs not being installed. One one site I have read: “By default flv selects mp3 audio but that is not configured in your ffmpeg. Install lame, make distclean, add –enable-mp3lame to configure command, make, retry. Some containers select default codecs that may not be installed, and do so silently” – from mplayerhq.hu So, looks like I need to install something, but what and how? Maybe there is something listed in the synaptic package manager that I can install…… Suggested Reading:Converting MPG to FLV Using FFMPEGLinux Apache MySQL PHP Server aka LAMPBluefish – Linux just gets better.Ruby Gems, Textiles, Redclothes and other new toysJoomla Installation Using Putty / SSh to Linux Server

I have recently bought a Sony DCR-SR35E Hard Disc Drive Handycam to film my baby son, but was struggling to find a way to showing the videos online, without having to resort to using public video sharing portals such as YouTube. The solution is to use FFMPEG to convert the .mpg files (which Sony Camcorders record in) and then set up a simple flash video viewer. I am fortunate in that a good friend knocked up some code for me to show the videos, and pointed me in the right direction to get them playing. To convert the .mpg file into a .flv one, I installed FFMPEG onto my Linux machine, and copied all the videos files over to there. Installing FFMPEG was easy using the Synaptic Package Manager which comes as standard on Ubuntu. Once installed, I simple navigated to the directory in which the MPG files were stored and then entered the following command: ffmpeg -i camcordervideo.MPG -f flv newfile.flv This worked OK, but not ideal. The thing about FFMPEG is that there are a plethora of options, and this created a new file based on default settings. The file created was too compressed for my liking, and [...]

As I use JAlbum to generate web albums, I need to install it onto my Linux machine. To do so I had to upgrade my Java Virtual Machine to Sun’s latest version. I decided to use the Synaptic Package Manager for this, as I was not entirely sure which packages I needed to install. With a quick search on Synaptic I quickly found the latest Sun Java files and installed them. After this Jalbum installed perfectly. My next task was to upload photos from my Canon EOS 20d camera to Ubuntu. The Canon software that comes with the camera does a fine job on Windows, but this was no use to me. First of all, Ubuntu did not recognise my Camera at all. A quick search revealed that I needed to change the camera’s communication setting from normal to PTP. I had never even heard of PTP before today. It stands for Picture Transfer Protocol (seems obvious now). According to Wikipedia Picture Transfer Protocol (PTP) is a widely supported protocol developed by the International Imaging Industry Association to allow the transfer of images from digital cameras to computers and other peripheral devices without the need of additional device drivers. Perfect [...]

The first time I looked at Linux was when I used a Knoppix Live CD. The reason I used the CD was actually to rescue some files from my wife’s hard drive after her windows installation died. While browsing through the applications on Knoppix I was quite impressed with the Bluefish HTML/web designers editor. Ubuntu comes with Screem, which looks OK, but not as impressive as Bluefish. Anyway, I just installed Bluefish. What prompted me to blog about this is that a few weeks ago when I first installed Ubuntu only my old pc, I felt really uneasy with using the terminal to do anything. I am starting to know my way around, and can even remember several different commands without having to look them up. But the point I am making, is that I have just installed Bluefish, and it was so straightforward. I have installed several new applications on my Ubuntu system this weekend, but only now it struck me that it now actually seems easier to install application on Linux than on Windows. To install Bluefish, all I had to do was type: sudo apt-get install bluefish Simple. I did not have to search for the Bluefish [...]

OK, I have been trying to do everything so far through the terminal, so better understand and learn about the Linux operating system, but I am now finding it more difficult to work out how to configure my server to allow me to host websites. So I have decided that I require a control panel that allows me to make the changes through a nice windows based interface. So, to install Webmin, I have so far installed perl5, which is a prerequisite: sudo apt-get install perl5 libnet-ssleay-perl followed by cd /usr/local/src ; wget http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/webadmin/webmin-1.310.tar.gz ; downloads webmin from the sourceforge website sudo tar xzvf webmin-1.310.tar.gz ; which extracts webmin from the compressed file cd webmin-1.310 ; takes you to yhe location of extracted files sudo sh setup.sh ; this installs Wembin – the first message is: *********************************************************************** * Welcome to the Webmin setup script, version 1.310 * *********************************************************************** Webmin is a web-based interface that allows Unix-like operating systems and common Unix services to be easily administered. Installing Webmin in /usr/local/src/webmin-1.310 … *********************************************************************** Webmin uses separate directories for configuration files and log files. Unless you want to run multiple versions of Webmin at the same time you can just accept the [...]

OK. just read up on what Molly-Guard is, and it is just a way to prevent the server being accidentely shut down remotely. There is a nice little story behind its definition: What is Molly Guard? A shield to prevent tripping of some Big Red Switch by clumsy or ignorant hands. Originally used of the plexiglass covers improvised for the BRS on an IBM 4341 after a programmer’s toddler daughter (named Molly) frobbed it twice in one day. Later generalised to covers over stop/reset switches on disk drives and networking equipment. So by simply typing in: apt-get install molly-guard this is the result: Reading package lists… Done Building dependency tree Reading state information… Done The following NEW packages will be installed molly-guard 0 upgraded, 1 newly installed, 0 to remove and 3 not upgraded. Need to get 6716B of archives. After unpacking 81.9kB of additional disk space will be used. Get: 1 http://gb.archive.ubuntu.com feisty/universe molly-guard 0.2.2-1 [6716B] Fetched 6716B in 0s (52.6kB/s) Selecting previously deselected package molly-guard. (Reading database … 105840 files and directories currently installed.) Unpacking molly-guard (from …/molly-guard_0.2.2-1_all.deb) … Setting up molly-guard (0.2.2-1) … So this is step one in the journey of a thousand miles of improving [...]

Well, it seemed extremely easy in the end to set up a home server. I feel that I have not advanced my understanding of Linux a great deal, but I did manage to get a server up an running, of sorts. At least, I think that it is up and running OK. I accessed my router controls, on IP address http://192.168.0.1, and in the Firewall section I opened up port 80 for HTTP and port 22 for SSH. I still could not access my server using PuTTy, which confused me. I thought that I had to change some configuration settings in Apache, and spent almost a day reading and searching the internet for tutorials. In the end, sort of out of desperation, I typed “sshd” (I saw a thread in a forum somewhere referring to running sshd to allow ssh access) into the Linux terminal, and received this reply: The program ‘sshd’ is currently not installed. You can install it by typing: apt-get install openssh-server So that is what I did, I typed “apt-get install openssh-server” and was greeted with this output: Reading package lists… Done Building dependency tree Reading state information… Done Suggested packages: rssh molly-guard The following NEW [...]

Got lots of help and advice this evening from my mate who is a bit of a wizard with computers. This evening I learnt these handy commands: (find . -type f -name ‘*.htm*’); do (to find all files within a directory that end in .htm or .hmtl or .htmanything) tar cvzf ~/mybackup.tar . (to back up the current directory to the home directory. cvzf stands for c: create archive, v: verbose, z: use compression, f: use the following filename) ls ~/mybackup.tar (to list the contents of the backup) mv ~/mybackup.tar ~/websites.20070926.tgz (to move the backup into a directory dated today) mkdir ~/websitebackups (to make a new directory in the home directory) mv ~/*tgz ~/*backups (to move all directories ending in tgz to the directory ending in backups – in this case, moving the one file we created earlier) The purpose of all this was to prepare to change the URLs inside all of my web files from absolute to relative. Still not done that part yet. Oh, I have got as far as changing the permissions across all directories in /var/www/ also, which was simply done by sudo chmod 755 -R * Piece of cake. One last thing was the [...]

Just found this page on the Ubuntu website, bookmarking it here. Looks like need to make some changes to get the .htaccess working. Also seems that I could have installed LAMP automatically with this command: To install the default LAMP stack in Ubuntu 7.04 (Feisty Fawn) In Feisty, the Ubuntu base system includes Tasksel. You can either install LAMP using tasksel or install the LAMP packages as detailed above. sudo tasksel install lamp-server The site also explains how to uninstall if everything goes pearshaped. Hopefully it will not come to that! Suggested Reading:Linux Ubuntu – a Whole New WorldInstallation of Domain Name Service (DNS) – BindBluefish – Linux just gets better.Mod rewrite / clean urls for Drupal on Ubuntu Apache ServerLinux, Apache, PHP Success. Next MySQL…

OK, it seems that I have a problem with permissions now (I initially thought that my .htaccess file is missing, which has code in to allow php to be parsed in html files). Anyway, I decided to create a new .htaccess first, using: sudo gedit /var/www/.htaccess and got this message: (gedit:8583): GnomeUI-WARNING **: While connecting to session manager: Authentication Rejected, reason : None of the authentication protocols specified are supported and host-based authentication failed. gedit opened OK, so I went ahead anyway and added my code; RemoveHandler .html .htm AddType application/x-httpd-php .php .htm .html But same problem occurred. I then had a hunch that the .htaccess was there all along, chose to view hidden files, and can see it. So, what is the problem? Permissions again? I think so… I managed to change the permissions of the directory /var/www/ so can now view all items within. However, I cannot seem to view items in the subdirectories, and the php is not being parsed / processed either. I have attempted the following: root@jon-desktop:/var/www# chmod -R 755 *.* and root@jon-desktop:/var# chmod 755 www but still no luck. Regardng the php, maybe the server is not configured correctly. When I had my site [...]

I guess this is where I find out if it is working…… Apache restarting with sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart I have only ever done this through the control panel of my web host so far. So interesting to see how it is really done! OK, the results: jon@jon-desktop:~$ sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart * Forcing reload of web server (apache2)… apache2: Could not reliably determine the server’s fully qualified domain name, using 127.0.1.1 for ServerName apache2: Could not reliably determine the server’s fully qualified domain name, using 127.0.1.1 for ServerName [ OK ] I hope that those messages are standard, i.e. “Could not reliably determine the server’s fully qualified domain name” Time to test if it has worked……… Yippee! Yes, entering http://localhost/testphp.php into the browser has produced a result, so PHP is working. I tried previously before installing Apache and PHP, and I simply got to option to download the file in which I had typed The results are: PHP Version 5.2.1 System Linux jon-desktop 2.6.20-16-generic #2 SMP Fri Aug 31 00:55:27 UTC 2007 i686 Build Date Jul 17 2007 17:59:41 Server API Apache 2.0 Handler Virtual Directory Support disabled Configuration File (php.ini) Path /etc/php5/apache2/php.ini Scan this dir for additional .ini files /etc/php5/apache2/conf.d [...]

As part of my ongoing self education of the internet and computers in general, I have just installed the open source operating system, Linux, onto my old Athlon 1Ghz pc. I chose Ubuntu (version 7.04) as I was advised that it is a very “newbie” friendly distribution. It was a breeze to install, there were no hardware issues, even though the pc is about 6 years old, and comes with the Firefox web browser ready installed, so the internet is available immediately. The plan is, with the help of an IT friend, to learn how to set up a home web server. I know that I need to install Apache, MySQL and PHP (i.e. the rest of L.A.M.P. – L being Linux) but know little else. I will blog my progress here, and hopefully this will eventually provide a simple step by step guide to how to set up a Linux web server at home. If all goes according to plan, I will be able to save on the month hosting fees that I currently pay. What with the arrival of my baby son, I need to save wherever I can, so hopefully the old pc with help me save [...]