Munckfish.net

I’ve wanted to make a note about this for a while. Seems ubuntu_demon (one of the ubuntu forum moderators) has collected together some interesting links on the subject here: Some interesting (ex-?) Mac users are switching to Ubuntu(3).

One Mac guy I noticed make the move is Mark Pilgrim. See When the bough breaks and Essentials, 2006 edition. Mark is the author of the excellent Python book Dive Into Python.

Note that if you need to uninstall VMWare Player (if you installed it from the Ubuntu repositories) you must select “Mark for Complete Removal” in Synaptic otherwise the vmware init scripts won’t get removed and the init process will logging errors (not fatal though) at startup. I think this is bug, I should probably raise it in launchpad.

Update: make sure your also completely remove the /etc/vmware directory and all files beneath it as well. The player uninstall process leaves this directory intact with the ‘locations’ file in it. When I tried to install VMWare Server it spotted that these files existed and though that it was already installed.

I know I’m probably a bit behind the times on this one, but I’ll make a note of it anyway. VMWare seem to have decided to make their VMWare Server product free. A few months back it was only the Player tool which was free and in order to use that you had to make use of pre-created virtual appliances.

However, the Server product does allow appliance creation so users can potentially install any OS they like (as long as it’s supported). This is great for me as I have been running Ubuntu as my main OS since it was released (June 2006) and although I could reboot into XP for Windows stuff it’s hassle and interrupts my productivety.

There’s a howto on the Ubuntu forum here: HowTo: Windows (XP) on Ubuntu with VMWare Server, and there are a selection of VMWare related articles on the Ubuntu Wiki. These ones seem the most relevant: VmwareServer, VMware Guide: Installing VMware Server on Ubuntu 6.06 LTS amd64.

The only downside at the moment compared to VMWare Player is that the Ubuntu repositories don’t seem to have Server packages available only the Player is included in the non-free section. So manual install for the moment. Lets hope .deb packages can be included into the repo soon.

One other thing to note. Before I upgraded to Dapper I was running VMWare player using bridged networking on Breezy. I was also using NetworkManager. I had a weird problem which I never got to the bottom of where bringing network interfaces up and down in NetworkManager would intermittently hang the system. I found a thread on the NetworkManager mailing list which seems to indicate I may have been suffering from a nic driver/vmware incompatibility, the solution to which was to upgrade the driver software. I’m hoping this issue has gone away in Dapper but I’ll need to prove that after I’ve installed VMWare Server.

I used to use FileZilla on Windows before I migrated to Ubuntu Linux. Found out today that the FileZilla team are working on a port to Linux. Alpha snapshots are available here:

http://filezilla-project.org/nightly.php.

FileZilla is a great FTP tool, user friendly and very capable. It appears that the team are using the cross-platform wxWidgets GUI toolkit for the UI, it uses GTK+ on linux so FileZilla already looks good on the Ubuntu (Gnome) desktop. I look forward to the official release of version 3 on linux. Here’s a screen shot.

Screen is a window manager for unix shells. It’s useful when logged in to a remote server because it allows you to have more than one shell running through the same terminal window. So you don’t have to log in multiple times through SSH to, for example, run a long running command in one shell and continue working in another.

This is just a quick note to help remember the most common commands. For more information see man screen.

Getting in and out

Start screen

Type screen in the terminal

Detach from a screen session (session remains open)

Ctrl+a d

Reattach to an open screen session

screen -D -R

Quit screen completely (session closed)

Ctrl+a Ctrl+\

Controlling windows

Create a new window with a shell and switch to it:

Ctrl+a c

List currently open windows for selection:

Ctrl+a "

Close current window:

Ctrl+a k

Controlling Regions

Using regions allows you to display more than one shell on your terminal.

Split the current region into 2 new ones (note: new region will be blank, you need to switch to it then select a window to display in it):

Ctrl+a S

Switch focus to the next region:

Ctrl+a TAB

Remove the current region:

Ctrl+a X

That should be enough to get started

Noticed today that Skype have release a beta version of their client for Linux. From the discussion on the Ubuntu forum it seems that it runs just fine out of the box for people with a clean Ubuntu Dapper install. Those that applied the workaround for the previous version have to revert those changes to get it up and running. I’ve installed it on my machine and with a little tweaking of the sound/mic/capture settings it seems to be working great!

This Ubuntu forum post contains instructions on how to make QT apps look a bit better under Gnome without having to install loads of KDE libs: HOWTO: Make QT apps look more Gnome’ish - Ubuntu Forums.

I’ve just set up SQL Server Express on our staging server cause I needed to interface Moodle with a customers existing SQLServer database for authentication.

This wasn’t as simple as I thought it would be, but after some set backs I got it working

Firstly, TCP connections to SQL Server Express are switched off by default to prevent newbie users opening themselves up to potential remote attack. Here’s a link to instructions on how to enable TCP connections: How to: Configure Express to accept remote connections.

Also note from the comments on the PHP mssql_connect function documentation that the hostname and port in the connection string are delimited using a comma ‘,’ rather than the more common colon ‘:’. E.g.

The first problem I encountered after this was an ‘Unable to connect to server’ error. By scanning the user comments on the PHP mssql_connect function page I noticed that a key step in fixing the problem was to replace the PHP5 provided ntwdblib.dll with a newer one from the MS SQL Client Tools. However, this DLL no longer ships with MS SQL Server Express. Luckily I had a developer installation of SQL Server 2000 on my XP partition and was able to pick up version 2000.80.2039.0 from that.

However, I then ran into another problem. When I replaced the PHP 5 provided version ntwdblib.dll of with the new one and restarted IIS, the output from phpinfo() showed that the mssql extension wasn’t loading anymore. I couldn’t see any errors reported in browser nor the system error logs.

By chance I decided to run php -i on the command line. This was lucky cause this way a system error dialog popped up a warning about a missing DLL dependency.

The problem was that the new ntwdblib.dll had a dependency on MSVCR71.DLL which couldn’t be found in IIS’ path. I did a search for msvcr*.dll in C:\WINDOWS and found a copy of this DLL in C:\WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v1.1.4322\. I copied it into my PHP install dir and restarted IIS. Then when I ran phpinfo() again the extension showed up.

This excellent tool allows you to view the interdependencies between Windows binary executables and DLL files. It also shows which symbols/functions are exported and used by each binary.

Dependency Walker

Found a interesting article on Sitepoint about currently available open source JavaScript libraries.

The JavaScript Library World Cup [JavaScript & DHTML Tutorials]