My wife has got a Sony Vaio netbook, which we bought a year ago. The whole point was to get a lightweight laptop for Internet access, e-mail and documents, so no development VMs or gaming station. The operating system chosen was Ubuntu, at that time it shipped with Gnome. However, due to some (relatively) recent updates to Ubuntu (as of version 11.04) it ships with Unity, and as of 11.10, they...
Sync Time and Date in Ubuntu Linux
Quick tip! If you’re using virtual machines to develop and test your web applications, you probably use the “save state/snapshot” feature instead of turning it off and on every time. I noticed after a while that my time was out of sync (a few weeks late) which caused a bunch of problems. Luckily, I found this simple command: sudo ntpdate ntp.ubuntu.com It will sync your time...
Ubuntu 11.10 Wireless on Sony Vaio with RT3090
Updated my Sony Vaio VPCM12M1R netbook to Ubuntu 11.10. The update went quite smooth although wireless immediately stopped working. Well it didn’t quite work with Ubuntu 10.10 either but the RT3090 package fixed it last time. Luckily I didn’t remove the package and was lucky to get things working on 11.10 simply by: sudo dpkg -i rt3090-dkms_2.3.1.3-0ubuntu0~ppa1_all.deb And obviously...
VirtualBox and NFS for Web Development
If you’re using VirtualBox for web development and sync data between the host and guest VMs using folder sharing via Guest Additions, you might have noticed that VirtualBox is not too good ad syncing files and some of them tend to get lost too. Here’s a good tutorial on Setting Up NFS in Ubuntu which turned out to be a great alternative, works crazy fast, no permissions issue, syncs...
Regex Replace in MySQL or lib_mysqludf_preg in Ubuntu Linux
I’ve been working a lot with MySQL lately, especially after the major theme and plugin upgrades on my blog. I was dealing with a bunch of content issues like redundant shortcodes and post meta, URL changes, images directories and more. One simple solution would be to grab the database dump, perform various search and replace operations and then feed it back in, and my goal was to do that...
Lesson Learned: Backup Before Upgrading
Friday started with off quite crazy with a surprise from my web hosting server. I don’t really know why but I decided to run an apt-get upgrade last night and everything seemed fine until this morning when I was unable to log back on via SSH. So what did I do? Reboot, obviously and it broke everything. Ping was lost, services are down, websites not working, oh my! I know my web hosting...
An Almost Smooth Upgrade to Ubuntu Linux 11.04
Right, we all heard it! Ubuntu 11.04 is out, with the new Unity bundled. I was excited to hear the news and I rushed to run the upgrade on my PC at work, which luckily has an Nvidia graphics card. I can’t believe the upgrade took so long (around two hours) but in the end, seems like it was worthed. Welcome to Unity, thought I.. Yeah, it was nice and shiny, smooth and all y’know...
How To Create a Remote Shared Git Repository
So Github doesn’t work for you? This article is about setting up a private, remote and shared Git repository for you and your team. I’m using Ubuntu 10.10 and 10.04, as well as Fedora Linux (assuming you replace apt-get with yum), anyhow this should work on all other distros with minor modifications. I’m not going to tell you what Git is, and I’m not going to teach you how...
Installing Python 2.5 on Ubuntu Linux 10.10
If you’ve been working on App Engine and you’ve noticed that some stuff works on your development server but not on your production, it may be related to the different versions of Python. Latest linux builds including Ubuntu 10.04 and 10.10 come with Python 2.6 pre-installed, but Google App Engine still runs Python 2.5 (an issue has been created to add Python 2.6 support, make sure...
Upgrading Django on Ubuntu Linux
As I wrote on Twitter a couple of times, I’ve been exploring the world of Django during the latest few weeks. I’m quite impressed with the framework, although there are some issues I’m not yet used to. This post is a short snippet for the Ubuntu users that are struggling with upgrading to the latest Django package. I’m not sure about other Linux distros, but the latest...