Colin Harrington

My experience in upgrading Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon to Hardy Heron was a fairly smooth one.  It was a straight forward process, The System Updater told me that there was a distribution upgrade.  I followed the assigned steps and shortly had upgraded my whole system.  The status bar was horribly in-accurate, changing from 4 minutes all the way to 54 minutes and back again in the matter of 30 seconds, but it was nothing that I haven’t seen on other operating systems. 

The Installer maintained all of my current customizations (since they are in my home directory ~/ ).  I was surprised to see that even my Compiz settings were all exactly how I had left them.  I was happy that the Installer asked me what to do with merge conflicts in my /etc files, (samba.conf, php.ini, apache2.conf, etc.).  There were only a few things that I had to tidy up

• Configuring the Launch Size of my Terminal window (Ubuntu Forums)
• blacklisting the pcspkr kernel module (by adding the line "blacklist pcspkr" to /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist – see ubuntuforums for more discussion)

I can now reliably use the standby functionality.  I have a dual Monitor setup and it works well. 

Is Ubuntu ready for mom?  no, but its definitely on the right course!  In my opinion, ubuntu is ready for the little brother, and the wife of a geek.  It doesn’t test the Mom test, nor the Grandma test yet. 

*Update* After a few months of using Hardy Heron, I have realized that Linux is my primary OS.  I’ve taken the jump – its working out great. I still have some things that I would like to see ironed out a bit more, but its worth much more than I paid for it!!

It had been a while since I re-imaged. I finally got a chance to buy a larger hard drive for my laptop.  I was suprised on how easy it was to get NTFS rw support with linux using NTFS-3G.  I decided a while ago to give Windows and Linux each their own partitions along with a shared Data Drive now in NTFS.

So the Partition Table looks like this: 

$ sudo fdisk -l /dev/sda

Disk /dev/sda: 200.0 GB, 200049647616 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 24321 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x2d24c9d9

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sda1   *           1        6266    50331613+   7  HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sda2            6267       15150    71360730    7  HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sda3           15151       23942    70621740   83  Linux
/dev/sda4           23943       24321     3044317+   5  Extended
/dev/sda5           23943       24321     3044286   82  Linux swap / Solaris

 Here is a good article about setting up NTFS Support in Ubuntu.  Linux is getting better every Day.

Yea I know… PHP.  Please don’t shoot me.  Its not as groovy as say … Groovy or Ruby, but it can get the Job done.  I just found out how to configure PHP per virtual host. I guess I knew that it was possible, I just did not know how to do it.  Tomorrow I’m planning on forgetting how to do it and have to look it up again, which is exactly why I’ll blog about it .

So Basically you can set specific PHP.ini settings in the virtual host definition.  There are other ways of configuring PHP, but this one seems to be aligned to virtual hosts and is the right tool for the job I had to do.

PHP alania tipped me off to PHP.net’s article on the subject.  It would look similar to:

 <virtualhost>
    DocumentRoot "C:\non\aya\business\public_html"
    ServerName www.somesite.com
    ServerAlias somesite.com
    <directory>
        Allow from all
        php_admin_flag short_open_tag off
    </directory>
</virtualhost>

Don’t forget that you could also configure PHP on the fly (while its running/executing) by utilizing the ini_set() function.

Happy PHP-ing!