What?

OK. Here's my situation. I have a laptop with a broken CDROM Drive, no floppy and a BIOS which does not support bootable USB. The only way to install was to load the HD with the installer and run from there. So:

1. Remove the HD load it into a USB HD caddy and mount it on a working system (at this stage it can be either Windows or Linux depending on what Disk Partitioning tools you have - you'll need one that supports EXT3)


2. Repartition the drive with a big EXT3 partition, a small (2Gb) EXT3 partition and a swap partition (2Gb)


3. Download or create from an existing CD, an ISO for your distribution - I wanted Ubuntu Desktop 8.10 Intrepid Ibex


4. Download, install and run UNetBootin


5. Point UNetBootin to your small EXT3 partition and your ISO and let it do it's thing.


6. Unmount the drive, install it back to the new machine and boot it


7. The UNetbootin menu appears, select "Default" and let it boot. For my Distro, it booted into Ubunto Desktop Live mounted at /cdrom which gives you an "Install" icon on the Desktop.


8. This is the key bit to allow the installer to work, start a Terminal window and run

   sudo umount -l -r -f /dev/sda2

   (where sda2 was the device mounted as cdrom)


9. Click "install" on the Desktop and run through the prompts. If you didn't umount the device at /cdrom, the partition manager will be disabled so cancel the install and unmount it.


10. When prompted reboot


11. The newly installed Distro should now start via Grub. On mine, it didn't. Grub didn't have a menu item for my OS. To fix this, I visited http://users.bigpond.net.au/hermanzone/p15.htm#Second_method_configfile_boot which helped me use the Grub CLI to finally boot then fix the grub installation. One problem was a missing vmlinuz symlink. Rather than trying to fix that, I used the full path to the original file for the Distro's kernel version (Ubuntu 8.10 installs /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.27-7-generic on my system). Once you got grub to boot manually, edit the /boot/grub/menu.lst file and enable updatedefaultentry. Save & exit then run sudo update-grub. Thant should sort you out.

Here's a working .htaccess file for CodeIgniter projects hosted on Heart Internet.

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^/system.*
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ index.php?/$1 [L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule ^(.+)$ index.php?/$1 [L]

*please note, I'm note endorsing the use of Heart Internet Hosting. You'll probably find better facilities elsewhere ;)

I'm now using this script to do a strategy #1 backup of my citadel server as a cron job.

It assumes you have a /root/backups/ directory and works on Ubuntu 8.10 Server with Citadel installed using "Easy Install"...

Basically, it shuts down citadel, waits for a bit for the service to complete shutting down, tars the citadel files to the selected location and restarts teh citadel service.

Enjoy.


#!/bin/sh
# Fear of Mice's Backup for Citadel
# http://www.fearofmice.co.uk/blog

CITADEL_DIR=/usr/local/citadel
TIMESTAMP=`date +%Y%m%d_%H%M%S`;
echo $TIMESTAMP


echo -n "Stopping Citadel... "
if $CITADEL_DIR/sendcommand DOWN >/dev/null 2>&1 ; then
sleep 10
echo "ok"
rm -f /usr/local/citadel/citadel.pid 2>/dev/null
echo "backing up..."
tar -cvf /root/backups/citadel_$TIMESTAMP.tar /etc/init.d/citadel /etc/init.d/webcit /usr/local/citadel/ > /root/backups/citadel_$TIMESTAMP.log
sleep 5
echo "backed up"
echo -n "Starting Citadel... "
if $CITADEL_DIR/citserver -d -h$CITADEL_DIR
then
echo "ok"
else
echo "Starting Citadel failed"
fi
else
echo "Stopping Citadel failed"
fi


Firefox in both Windows and Linux lets you drag a tab to the Desktop which gets saved as a .url file. Inspecting these files shows the url in question is saved as text inside the file.

On Windows, Firefox is quite happy to open the browser at the url when double-clicking the .url file. In Linux (at least in KDE which my Kubuntu install uses) this doesn't happen. Firefox opens the file itself so you get a browser window containing the url text.

This is how I got Firefox on KDE to open my files as desired.

1 - create /bin/url.sh
#!/bin/bash
IFS=$'©'
FFOPENURL=$(less $1)
firefox $FFOPENURL

2 - Right-click a sample .url file, select "Open with" from the popup menu and enter /bin/url.sh in the edit box. Make sure you tick the "Remember application association for this file type" box. Click OK.

This should now work...

Boo Hoo. My perfectly stable install of VMWare Desktop v5.5.5 stopped working today. Clicking the icon on my desktop popped up the Hourglass cursor which went away after 3-4 secs with nice VMWare screen at the end of it.

It turns out a recent Ubuntu Automatic Update installed new Kernel files (I'm now on v2.6.15-27) and as VMWare was compiled/configured against my older kernel, it fell over.

So. To fix it:

1. Start a console session


2. type

   sudo apt-get install kernel-headers-`uname -r`

   to install the C header files for the current kernel


3. type

   /usr/bin/vmware-config.pl

   to recompile the VMWare binaries


4. You can now run VMware Workstation by invoking

   /usr/bin/vmware

Worked a dream.

My new Kubuntu Dapper install wouldn't play my MP3s which are stored on a remote Samba share though local MP3s were fine.

The above link supplies a HOWTO to fix this. Basically set up the SMB share with a local mount point, stuff it in etc/fstab to mount automagically and away you go...