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...

openSUSE Xen guest

Works like a charm, just dont install the xen-kmp-default guest driver package, as it will ruin the ata diver.
I'm still trying to figure out how to disable only the ata part of these drivers, but for now, just dont install them or your system will be completely unbootable.

Trixbox firstrun experiences

Just finished installing and encountering something annoying in the zaptel installation which causes Asterisk to keep restarting, the following post solved that one:
http://fonality.com/trixbox/forums/trixbox-forums/help/asterisk-fails-start-bootup
(amportal start, chkconfig -level 345 zaptel off )

And ofcourse i was to lazy to read the wiki:
http://fonality.com/trixbox/forums/trixbox-forums/help/trixbox-ce-web-gui-password

To fix the possibility of playback recorded conversations and/or voicemails in browser, the following worked:
http://www.freepbx.org/forum/freepbx/users/ari-users-cant-play-the-voicemail-recordings

After updating all packages with yum update, start the memcached service to enable php sessions (needed ie for the voicemail playback application to run smoothly, else the playback popup remains empty ie).

Seems to be starting to work here!

Do not try to use a Highpoint RocketRAID with Linux

For it will eat your computer, steal your car, mess with your savings (even more than the banks already did), vote for the ultranionalists and simply make your life miserable...

Why? Well, because Highpoint doesnt seem to grasp the concept of updating drivers for new kernels or cooperating with distributions.

Buy something else (a very standard Adaptec worked magically for me), but really, save yourself the HighPointmess.

Wat een dag

Optie 1
/
Optie 2
/
Optie 3

doorhalen wat niet van toepassing is.

New and improved

http://www.ov-stripkaart.nl/

Gmail protocolhandler for Firefox

Simply follow the instructions here:

http://lifehacker.com/392287/set-firefox-3-to-launch-gmail-for-mailto-links

So there are games for Linux

Yeah, really, they do exist!!!

http://omgsuse.com/content/10-awesome-free-games-opensuse?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+omgsuse+%28OMG!+SUSE!%29&utm_content=Google+Reader

Force fsck on reboot

Turns out to be as simple as creating an empty file called forcefsck in the root filesystem, like:

touch /forcefsck

then hit reboot and get a cup of whatever beverage seems appropriate at the moment.

Eclipse and XulRunner suggest or autocomplete nastyness

As it turns out, after some serious annoyance and googlesque digging, XulRunner 1.9.1 and Eclipse do seem to have some serious cooperation issues to work out.

Instead, just deinstalling 1.9.1 and installing 1.9.2 seems to work a lot more like expected....

https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=303372

New netbook or upgrade old one?

Well, after doing some market research i've decided to stick with my >1y old Acer Aspire One and upgrade the memory to 1.5GB.
Sometimes you don't have to be ahead of the flock to enjoy what you have, actually the Acer is a fine little machine, one of the main features i like about it is its solid state hdd, which enables me to use it even in more bumpy circumstances.

Awell, here are a few links:
Upgrading the memory:
http://www.crunchgear.com/2008/08/28/how-to-add-ram-to-the-acer-aspire-one-netbook/

And replacing the (very shortly lived) dead accu:
http://store.acer-euro.com/home/aspire-one-6-cels-accu-zwart.html?s=6&l=en&p=3&i=36107

Using nouveau on openSUSE 11.3

Nouveau, for those unknowing souls, is the next generation open source nvidia display driver.

Starting to use it however, after an openSUSE 11.1 -> 11.2 -> 11.3 upgrade, could be cumbersome.
Especially resolutions tend to be not resolved correctly.

To try and polish things up, try the following console command:
mv /etc/X11/xorg.conf /etc/X11/xorg.conf.bak

then restart X (ctrl+alt+backspace or the nicer way of logging out).
Everything will be detected automagically then

openSUSE on a stick

The release of 11.3 is a good opportunity to perform some sweeping, swooping and swapping off the depricated 11.1 and 11.2 versions of my infrastructure, therefor it comes in very handy when one just needs to run around carrying an usb stick instead of having to burn/reburn rewritables....
Anyway, follow the following steps and you should be right as rain (mostly copied from http://en.opensuse.org/Live_USB_stick):

• Insert the usb stick into a free usb (yeah, really) port
• Check if it shows up after issuing the following console command: ls -l /dev/disk/by-id/*usb*
• If it does, then unmount it: umount /dev/sdX (X being the disks id)
• Now write the iso onto the stick: dd if=/path/to/iso/NameOf.iso of=/dev/sdX
• After a few moments something reassuring (like how many bites were written) should appear and your good to go!
  

Using PHP to insert blobs in a MSSQL database

Is a very straightforward job, once you've figured out how MSSQL wants the data supplied....

As hex....

http://www.php.net/manual/en/function.unpack.php#54910