This works for a couple of subdomains/sites only. If you need to have a load of sites or other settings this is not for you. On the other hand this method needs no web server configuration.

1. In your systems hosts file (Windows: In your favourite text editor open %SYSTEMROOT%\system32\drivers\etc\hosts and on Linux it’s /etc/hosts.
2. Find the line defining 127.0.0.1, i.e. your local horst, erm localhost and append sitename1.localhost to the end of the line. do so for every site name you need.
3. Go to your apaches/webservers documents folder holding your drupal installation. Say it’s htdocs/drupal than you need folder sites. There should be at least two folders called all and default. Copy default and name it sitename1.localhost, i.e. excactly the string you added to your hosts file (again you need to replace sitename1 by your site’s name but do include the dot!).
4. In your web browser type sitename1.localhost/drupal to test if drupal shows up at all (meaning your OS resolves your “domain name” correctly) and if it shows your old content (meaning it works).

Now you have two options to actually set up your “new site”: Either edit the settings.php that should be in the new folder to use a diferent data base (that should be well-stocked with drupal data) or just install a fresh drupal site. You achieve the later by doing:

1. Delete settings.php. That should leave you with a file named default.settings.php.
2. Point your browser to sitename1.localhost/drupal/install.php and do everything like you did with the first install but use a diferent database (or the same but different database prefix).
3. Done.

Resources

• settings.php

As described at it’s straight forward:

sudo /bin/hostname mynewhostname

Supplying the path to the binary is for security reasons, I guess, to make sure we have the right bin (eventhough it could have been replaced there, too…).

But the people at debianadmin.com forgot to mention in order to avoid “hostname: Unknown Host” you have to

sudo edit /etc/hosts

and change it there, too!

Straight from Ubuntuguide.org:

You can also get Mouse over preview to work by installing:

sudo apt-get install mpg321
sudo apt-get install mpg123-esd
sudo apt-get install vorbis-tools
sudo apt-get install esound
sudo apt-get install ubuntu-restricted-extras

with this system Skype still functions.

Also, there is a very interesting article at Linux Owns showing three steps to get all your favourite packages (back) fast. I added a fourth step actually saving your package list for later use. Deriving it straight from there (without testing, since unfortunatelly my last machine has been hardyed just a couple of hours ago):

1. integrate medibuntu sources.list

   
   sudo wget http://www.medibuntu.org/sources.list.d/gutsy.list -O /etc/apt/sources.list.d/medibuntu.list
   

2. add server key

   
   wget -q http://packages.medibuntu.org/medibuntu-key.gpg -O- | sudo apt-key add - && sudo apt-get update
   

3. write a text file listing all package names you wish installed separated with spaces — you should be able to instead put every package name in one line with trailing \\ (double back-slash) but as I said: I haven’t tested it, yet! Name it, say, most_important_debs.

4. 
   sudo aptitude --assume-yes install < most_important_debs
   

   You might want to approve the package list before install. In that case omit –assume-yes

Let me know it someone used it (hopefully with success).

Update 2008/05/15: It does help to read and think before you speak (or write for that matter). I got it completely wring. The linked article is about packages from Medibuntu only. OK then, if it’s like this I just alter 1, 2, 4 and 3 -> 1

1. build a list of your (most important, enduser) packages
2. update-manager -d, i.e. dist-upgrade your system
3. employ aptitude to read in your file (to be exact it’s bash that redirect from the file…)

Of course, this method still does not solve the problem of saving your personal settings but still get all the system settings from the new distro release. But this shouldn’t be that hard for release maintainers since they (potentially) know which package version had what config files delivered or generated. From there it should be easy to determine if a system config file has been changed be the user -> show diff. Or do I overlook something once again?

Update 2008/05/15: Even better looks aptitude-run-state-bundle:

DESCRIPTION
aptitude-create-state-bundle produces a compressed archive storing the files that are required to replicate the current
package archive state.  The following files and directories are included in the bundle:
·      $HOME/.aptitude
·      /var/lib/aptitude
·      /var/lib/apt
·      /var/cache/apt/*.bin
·      /etc/apt
·      /var/lib/dpkg/status
The output of this program can be used as an argument to aptitude-run-state-bundle(1).

Update 2008/05/15: A good starting point would be either

dpkg -l | grep ^i | editor

or if you don’t use aptitude this also shows (only currently) installed packages

dpkg -l | grep ^i | editor

One needs to remove non-package-name strings, though. As I haven’t come around to learn sed (line editing) I cannot show how to deploy sed to do it. Anyone?

There is a neat cheat sheet out in PDF format from FOSS covering, among many others, the new Ubuntu Uncomplicated Firewall ufw, special packages, of course apt-family package management, services a.k.a init scripts and daemons, …

It’s released under CC-BY-SA 3.0. By the way, did you know

Type the phrase “REISUB” while
holding down Alt and SysRq (PrintScrn) with
about 1 second between each letter. Your system
will reboot.

You can do Dist-Upgrades not only with the GUI update-manager but also via do-release-update. The tool tells me what awaits me (I have 6000 kB/s):

66 packages are going to be removed. 193 new packages are going to be
installed. 1269 packages are going to be upgraded.

You have to download a total of 1005M. This download will take about
23 minutes with your connection.

Fetching and installing the upgrade can take several hours. Once the
download has finished, the process cannot be cancelled.

So, let’s see.

Btw do-release-update by itself notices if you are connected via ssh and asks if you want to proceed. If you do you’ll get a second sshd on Port 9904. Using screen it shouldn’t be a problem for me but very nice of the tool to ask

After I created a new user testuser

sudo adduser testuser

I couldn log in this new user via

ssh newuser@localhost

SSH told me “Permission denied, please try again.” If I’d only switch users with

su - newuser

login was granted. So I had a look at

sudo vim /etc/ssh/sshd_config

and looked for

AllowUsers

and appended the new user in that line. Now I needed to reload (in case you are logged in via ssh) the server:

sudo /etc/init.d/ssh reload

and access is granted!

Ressources

• None

Allthough I haven’t found some shiny GUI somewhat like Netlimiter there is Wonder shaper (and shaper and trickle and squid for http and …) where a single command line sets your over-all bandwidth for network interface X. And, isn’t that all you really need?:

sudo wondershaper ethX downlink(kbit/s) uplink(kbit/s)

This is, from the perspective of the host doing the shaping. For example to set download to 10000kb (750*8 = 6000 DSL but don’t limit intranet connections on 1Mb Ethernet) but limit upload to, say, 35kB (~280kb) — e.g. if you have a server running on the same connection you do your daily internetting, you do:

sudo wondershaper eth0 10000 280

Ressources

• Ubuntuusers.de Forum (German)
• Traffic Shaping (German)
• Squid Delay Pools (German)
• Bandwidth Limiting HOWTO
• man (8 ) wondershaper

Sit back, watch the video

and read more and more or more.

I’m not quite sure, yet, what I think of it, but putting the “Can it really be realised/implemented?” question aside, his idea really sounds stamin! I’ll definitely will have an eye on it and would love to see those ideas aroused!

By the way, the Drupal module it obviously started with is Activity Stream.

Side note: What do I tag this with? Where is wordpress’s option for the infinity-all-possible-ever-thought-of-tag?

In Drupal 6 this can be done with core modules like this:

1. enable Trigger module
2. add an action
3. add advanced action at the bottom and choose “Redirect to URL”
4. use description regardless of how you will use it but rather describing what this action does; e.g. “redirect to start node”
5. as URL apply “node”
6. set-up the appropriate trigger
7. from the drop-down list at “Trigger: After a user has logged in” select your new action from just now
8. log out and back in again to test it

Note: In the links provided you need to change saying “your-domain-path-to-drupal” by your actual domain name (or navigate as usual if you now where to find the settings pages in Drupal 6) to make it http://example.com/admin. If you happen to have clean urls disabled you might know already that you also need to prefix the admin path by “?q=” so it alltogether looks like this: http://example.com/?q=admin

Resources

• HowTo trigger Emails when Comment has been posted
• for advanced redirects see Login Destination module

All you need is the Windows Installer itself. Hit Win+R (command line dialog) and execute the following line (change file name and target folder, of course):

msiexec /a c:\tmp\MSIFileName.msi /qb TARGETDIR="c:\tmp\msitmp\"

You’ll find all files in your target folder.

Here are some more or less useful mashups (-lists) I stumbled upon that seam to be nice:

• Last.fm Mashups
• list of 36 last.fm mashups with short description

last.fm’s events function together with fusecal could be very usefull for bands’ websites to give visiters an easy way to be noticed only for concerts around there home town, e.g.

If you ever wanted to move your (very large) file that contains a Virtualbox’s guest hard drive (file extension is .vdi) to another location and did so just like that Virtualbox wouldn’t find it the next time you wanted to boot into your guest system. The only thing Virtualbox needs to be pointed to is the new location of that file.

The standart location of VDI files is (for Linux) ~/.VirtualBox/VDI/ (see global settings, where you could also change this if that’s all you want). Remember the old file name and close Virtualbox, just in case it would overwrite settings when closed after the following changes. Now let’s move one file to, say, /media/USBDrive/virtualbox/. Now do:

1. Use your favorite editor to open ~/.VirtualBox/Virtualbox.xml
2. Find the line that says something like:

   
   <VirtualDiskImage filePath="VDI/old file name.vdi"/>
   

3. Change it to point to your new location. So it should read something like:

   
   <VirtualDiskImage filePath="/media/USBDrive/new file name.vdi"/>
   

4. Done.

You need:

1. Old/original Windows XP installation CD (any of SP0 to SP2 will do even though only those from SP2 are supported officially). Make sure to use build 5512 or above.
2. Microsoft Windows SP3
3. unzipper like WinRar, unrar for  Linux / Ubuntu or the like
4. ISO creator / CD burn program like mkisofs, InfraRecorder, UltraISO, Basero (or others) or even old school
5. Boot image exctracted using BBIE or use this (also see Box.net box below)
6. ~ 1 GB free tmp space on disk

You do:

1. Extract / copy old Windows CD’s content (including hidden files!) to one folder (e.g. c:\XPCD)
2. extract SP3’s content to another folder (e.g. c:\XPSP3) using e.g. unrar, winrar or hit Win+R and type

   
   c:\XPSP3\windowsxp-kb936929-sp3-x86-enu.exe –x
   

   and select target folder, here c:\XPSP3

3. To slipstream the old CD do Win+R and copy+paste or type

   
   c:\XPSP3\i386\update\update.exe /integrate:c:\XPCD
   

4. Create bootable CD image or CD using the boot image and your updated folder c:\XPCD. I recommend using mkisofs (Windows or Linux executable) using

   
   mkisofs \
       -b cdboot/msboot.img -no-emul-boot -boot-load-seg 1984 -boot-load-size 4 \
       -iso-level 2 -J -l -D -N -joliet-long -relaxed-filenames \
       -V "WINSP" \
       -o ../winsp.iso .
   

   from within the root folder of the CD to be, i.e. c:\XPCD. Create a new folder there and drop your boot image, i.e. cdboot/msboot.img.

5. Done.

You might want to try booting from the image using VirtualBox.

Resources:

• apcmag.com
• How to create a Windows bootable CD with mkisofs
• Command-line switches for Windows software update packages
• Windows XP SP3 final (5512) download

Isn’t this just splendid?

If you ever wandered who was first, Firefox (FF) or Opera, in implementing the full text history search accessed in the address bar. In both, Opera and Firefox, the search covers at least page titles in addition to URLs. Bay the way I’m not talking about the feature called “nickname” or “keyword” in Opera and Firefox, respectively.

So far so good, as it’s a really nice feature and it doesn’t harm at all to have it in the best two browsers there are. But never the less I was curious as of who was actually the first to introduce the feature. Not that it’ll happen like with tabbed browsing or other really helpful function introduced to “the masses” by Opera.

Excursion on tabbed browsing

Only by the fact that people switching from IE to FF in lack of knowledge about Opera, Firefox has been awarded with being the inventor. Well, actually, it was more complicated than the simple FF vs. Opera. A project called NetCaptor in 1998 had tabbed browsing before others all though it was not a fully featured http web browser instead it used IE’s socalled Tradient Layout Engine. Opera had Multi Document Interface (MDI) before other browsers but tabbed browsing is claimed to have been in mozillas trunk before Opera extended their concept of multi docoment views. So I will close this side leap by breaking it down by a term by Adam Stiles:

“Actually, tabbed browsing is over 7 years old - Firefox, Mozilla, Opera, Safari and others can all trace their tabbed browsing DNA back to NetCaptor at some level.”

Back to Full Text History Search:

For one Opera 9.5 Alpha 3 introduced this feature publicly for the Norwegian browser in Sept. 2007. And as Pavel Studený lines out Opera not only searches URLs and page titles but also complete page contents (plus shows the last visit date in the result list). From trying out without knowing better so far FF 3 only searches URLs and page titles. Does any one know better about Firefox 3?

Sidenote: In Opera the index size for pages indexed in cache can be tuned through the Preference Editor by MaxVisitedPagesIndexSize (supposingly in KB, -1 means unlimited, i.e. limited by cache size I presume and 0 means deactivated). By the way, there is another way to access history search if you’d like to focus more on prettier results overview. And yet another hint for the use of Opera’s version: It sorts the results by hits on URLs followed by those in page titles and the like, thereby ignoring punctuations (all?). Hence, if you know right away you want to search titles or descriptions of pages only start with a punctuation like so: ;opera.

As much as I’m into open source and don’t like the consept of closed source software, Opera clearly is an exception! They even do really good ads:

(or download it)

Well, there am I trying to convince joomla 1.5 to use my template’s favicon instead of the default jommla flower . But no matter what it wouldn’t let me replace it by my own. What I’ve done so far:

• create the .ico file with Gimp, 32×32 (tried 16×16 also), 4 bpp 16-slot palette
• placed it in ../templates/my_template/favicon.ico
• reloaded page in browser

But still no favicon is shown in neither Opera nor Firefox under Windows.

Update: It seams I somehow used wrong colour palette, layer or whatever optioins. After I uploaded a png file to FavIcon and used the result it at least shows in Firefox. Opera seams to chuck up on the HTML header created by Joomla:

<head>
  [...]
 <title>Welcome to the Frontpage</title>

  [...]
  <link href="/joomla/templates/div_template/favicon.ico" rel="shortcut icon" type="image/x-icon" />
  [... repeated multiple times somehow ...]
  <link rel="stylesheet" href="http://localhost/joomla/templates/div_template/css/template_css.css" type="text/css"/>
  <link rel="shortcut icon" href="http://localhost/joomla/images/favicon.ico" />
  <link href="/joomla/css/template.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" />
</head>

As far as my understanding goes Opera doesn’t mistaken as to overwrite the earlier favicon.ico link with the later and hence (as Opera does) show the correct, i.e. intended favicon for a glimpse of a second and than show none as the /joomla/images/ one is not there. If I place a copy in that directory on the server Opera also shows the icon — I asume the wrong one though!

Well, anyway, now I know where the rub is…

Update 2008/05/08: I should have digged into templating a bit further and not just take it “as is”. Now in the html header of .../templates/my_template/index.php I just leave out the line where it points to the joomla template but rather only have one “shortcut icon” href as below:

<head>
	<jdoc:include type="head" />

	<link rel="stylesheet" href="<?php echo $this->baseurl ?>/templates/system/css/system.css" type="text/css" />
	<link rel="stylesheet" href="<?php echo $this->baseurl ?>/templates/system/css/general.css" type="text/css" />

	<link rel="stylesheet" href="<?php echo $this->baseurl ?>/templates/<?php echo $this->template ?>/css/layout.css" type="text/css" />
	<link rel="stylesheet" href="<?php echo $this->baseurl ?>/templates/<?php echo $this->template ?>/css/typography.css" type="text/css" />
	<link rel="stylesheet" href="<?php echo $this->baseurl ?>/templates/<?php echo $this->template ?>/css/browserhacks.css" type="text/css" />
	<link rel="shortcut icon" href="<?php echo $this->baseurl ?>/templates/<?php echo $this->template ?>/icon/favicon.ico" />
</head>

Here is a forum post on how to make all incoming connections to your apache web server redirect to https, i.e. take encripted connections via ssl by using apache’s rewrite module.

Note 08/01/08: There have been issues after the original plugin has been updated. See Ubuntu Forum, Bug description (workaround or fixed deb for firefox only which is version 9.0.115!) or comments below for more. Components have been removed that also opera needs! Yet another example why closed source is bad… Hence you might want to give gnash a go, i.e. open source flash. The new Flash version is meant to work with opera version > 9.50 Beta, though (see bottom note). Anyway, here it goes for Flash version 9.0.48.0:

Note 2008/04/19: Before you get all frustrated about Flash and Opera you might enjoy operas’ ads.

Here we go

To install Adobe Flash Player after you installed Opera in Ubuntu, I found the best way is to, once again, use the debian way:

sudo aptitude install flashplugin-nonfree

After the install routine is done you need to add the path to plugins options in opera. Alternatively you could link there. To find where the new binaries are located do:

dpkg -S flashplugin-nonfree
app-install-data: /usr/share/app-install/desktop/flashplugin-nonfree.desktop
flashplugin-nonfree: /usr/lib/flashplugin-nonfree
flashplugin-nonfree: /var/cache/flashplugin-nonfree
flashplugin-nonfree: /usr/share/lintian/overrides/flashplugin-nonfree
flashplugin-nonfree: /usr/share/doc/flashplugin-no