openSUSE 12.1 some experiences and MySQL

openSUSE 12.1 was released some 2 weeks ago and i must say it has been a welcome change of scenery! The new LibreOffice works just that little bit smoother, the desktop feels more responsive, the startup time is severely faster, in other words, its really nice! GNOME 3 looks very promising from a tabletpoint of view, but after 3 days of wrestling with the new Shell interface i decided to go conservative and switch back to KDE 4.7, which is a lot less buggy than the previous 4.x releases thusfar. The only real trouble is, Dolphin doesnt seem to work with SFTP/Fish at the moment, there is a bug open for that (https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=715689 ). Second observation is that Acrobat Reader seems to be even more resourcehungry than usual (https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=731896). Third real trouble is that the MySQL my.cnf config file has had some changes and the new YaST policy is that existing files are no longer overwritten, which in my case resulted in a my.cnf.rpmnew file and a non working MySQL. After applying my changes to the rpnnew file and ditching the old my.cnf it seems to work again. Eclipse has some major issues with some debugsetting in KDE 4.7, which was accidently left in place by the packager (https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=731075 ), but after changing that on startup, its just as smoot as ever! All in all, it's a very nice release and besides those points mentioned above, i've had a very entertaining ride so far, it seems that the releases are getting more stable every time! Many thanks to all those great people at openSUSE!

Collaboration on standardization in the PHP Universe?

Well it certainly appears to be that there is a momentum gaining traction of several established opensource PHP projects actually looking over their hedges and adapting standards! This is very much a good thing! Standardization is not always useful, sometimes specialisation is a necessity, but in the PHP world, the Not Invented Here syndrom finally seems to be going downhill! Drupal 8 and Symfony 2

Drupal + Alfresco + Google Docs = ?

At the very least its a very interesting and promising combination of technologies which could be utilised in very exiting informationsharing initiatives. http://www.appnovation.com/alfresco-google-doc-integration-canopy

Eclipse and XulRunner at it again

Unfortunately, the nasty episode from around a year ago is still source of a lot of annoyances in using the (otherwise great) Eclipse platform. I do embrace the concept of loosely coupled components instead of giant balls of library-bundling, but i must admit, it has its advantages. On openSUSE 11.4 after some updating, XulRunner screwed up content assyst/auto completion again, this time i used another workaround, namely exactly specifying the XulRunner path in the eclipse.ini configuration -vmargs: -Dorg.eclipse.swt.browser.XULRunnerPath=/usr/lib64/xulrunner-1.9.2/xulrunner Indigo seems to play nice with this version, at least, until now.

Tine2.0 on a shared host experience

If you cannot set php ini values through the htaccess files, then you have to get a bit creative:

In index.php and setup.php add:

ini_set('memory_limit','128M');

And after that, enable the magic_quotes_gpc hack:
1. Uncomment magic_quotes_gpc Hack in setup.php
2. Uncomment magic_quotes_gpc Hack in index.php
3. Change in Setup/Controller.php

// check php environment
$requiredIniSettings = array(
'magic_quotes_sybase' => 0,
'magic_quotes_gpc' => 1,
'magic_quotes_runtime' => 0,
'mbstring.func_overload' => 0,
'eaccelerator.enable' => 0,
'memory_limit' => '48M'
);

openSUSE AD joining

Works like a charm, as long as the dns resolving configuration is edited as follows:
/etc/nsswitch.conf:
hosts: files dns
#hosts: files mdns4_minimal [NOTFOUND=return] dns

Else the DC cannot be found.

Drupal 6 to 7 upgrade menu drama

Well, it took some time to figure out that according to some people in the Drupal development team disappearing menu items can be considered an undocumented feature...

To quote these very helpful people on the Drupal bugtracker (http://drupal.org/node/761648):
"This is just a normal bug, annoying but not a release blocker, easily fixed by configuration."
"yeah there is no significant subsystem broken here. And has nada to do with D7 upgrade.... just a bug."

Unbelievable.....

Especially since the fix is quite simple and could have been documented very easily in UPDATE.TXT (since this behaviour was known some 6 months before the Drupal 7 release): just re-enable the menu's in /admin/structure/types for each content type you want to be able to point a menu entry to...