So I figured I’d try packaging and a couple of hours later and I’ve a copy in my PPA. I’m unsure who maintains the packaging guide so I wanted to say thank you on Ubuntu Planet hoping those involved see it. Its great when you want to try something, find comprehensive instructions and can wrap it up in a few hours.

His answer? “Oh no that’s free, it’s bound to be rubbish.”

Strange, I thought he wanted Photoshop free.

Linux
If you’re using Linux, you’re probably a geek and don’t need some guy who blogs about manliness to tell you how to edit your host file.

That doesn’t really bother me. The customer support agent told me to use BT’s speed diagnostic tool. Now aside from why their tool would be better, its not really an option as its a poorly written Java applet that doesn’t seem to work with Firefox or Chromium in Linux. Now I dare say I could get it to work but why spend the energy? When I mentioned it to the agent, he told me BT doesn’t officially support Linux and helpfully suggested I keep a Windows laptop handy.

Are you kidding? Keep a Windows laptop handy? There are reasons why I use Linux, there are reasons people use Macs and Windows too – they chose to. What the hell has that got to do with my ISP? I have no software from them, it’s a wireless access point they provide. Do you know what operating system it runs? Linux.

The page explains what to do but in synopsis, you need to add the repository and install two packages, obviously check out the site before blindly following me:

Add the repository to /etc/apt/sources.list:

deb http://www.bchemnet.com/suldr/ debian extra

Now, I know Ubuntu has the apt-add-repository command, however it will create a source entry too, which will give you an error:

W: Failed to fetch http://www.bchemnet.com/suldr/dists/debian/Release
Unable to find expected entry  extra/source/Sources in Meta-index file
(malformed Release file?)

If you did then you need to remove the offending deb-src http://www.bchemnet.com/suldr/ debian extra entry.

That done, add the GPG key and update the apt cache.

wget -O - http://www.bchemnet.com/suldr/suldr.gpg | sudo apt-key add -
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install samsungmfp-driver samsungmfp-data

It will then pick up and install when you plug it in. Samsung themselves provide a 30 odd Mb driver file, here. There are a whole list of the differences here but for me, I prefer Debian compliance and not installing anything I don’t need.

Oh and a big thank you to everyone who sent me suggestions of what to do in San Diego. People can be surprisingly open and friendly – especially within our community.

Still, it was more productive than my week with my Open University module that starts in October – T175 (Networked living: exploring information and communication technologies). The OU can be very Windows dependent but this course seems to be pretty much delivered in Virtual Learning Environment (what the OU calls Moodle). I ran the course DVD, which is a Windows Flash standalone thing which got me to revive the OU Ubuntu Users group, sending out emails, starting a mailing list and trying to get things going again.

So why was it unproductive? Well, I haven’t booted Windows in ages – there were a million updates, one of which was for the wireless driver. Update completely borked the wireless and I wound up restoring the drive. That aside, one thing I really like about Ubuntu (and most distributions) is a centralised update manager – Windows has Adobe, Java, Windows Update, Firefox and McAfee all trying to pull updates at the same time. It makes the system completely unusable for the first ten minutes it’s on!

Any way, I decided to build a new WordPress theme. Same colour scheme, more rounded edges – should be available in the next few days.

Edit ~/.vimrc or /etc/vim/vimrc (for system wide) and add turn off vi compatibility:

set nocompatible

The latter can be improved by editing ~/.inputrc (or /etc/inputrc for everyone). Pressing the up key scrolls through all the commands you’ve typed but by adding:

"\e[A":history-search-backward
"\e[B":history-search-forward

You can type the first letter or two and get the command you need, so if you typed “mysql -u root -p” last Tuesday but can’t remember the options, typing “my” and pressing the up key will find it.

Synaptic (System→Administration→Synaptic Package Manager) lets you install common groups of packages (Edit->Mark packages by task…) in this case a LAMP server. You can do the same from a command line using “sudo tasksel install lamp-server“. Since Ubuntu 10.10, you need to install tasksel to install by task either way – “sudo apt-get install tasksel”.

Once the components are installed, you’ll be asked for a root password – this is used by MySQL and is not the system’s root password.

The default web root is /var/www – if you check it now there is an index.html. Open a browser and goto http://localhost, you’ll be greeted with the contents of that file so we know the system is working. So how do we get our own files up?

You need to consider permissions, this is the casue of “Forbidden/You don’t have permission to access / on this server” error messages . There are a couple of ways but I recommend using the www-data group. You could use a folder in your home folder, however I have never got this will not work with encrypted home folders. I would leave /var/www in root’s ownership and add each subsite as belonging to www-data then give that group write access:

sudo mkdir /var/www/wordpress; sudo chown :www-data wordpress; sudo chmod g+w wordpress

The first user will have been added to this group during installation (you may need to logout) but further users can be added using System→Administration→Users and Groups or by:

sudo useradd -G www-data username

Apache uses virtual hosts – multiple sites on the same server. Each site is defined by a configuration file in /etc/apache2/sites-available. If you look there now, you’ll see the default site, we can use this as a template for a new site:

sudo cp /etc/apache2/sites-available/default /etc/apache2/sites-available/wordpress
gksu gedit /etc/apache2/sites-available/wordpress

You need to add a ServerName, change the VirtualHost, DocumentRoot and Directory to point to the folder your site is going to be in, changes are in red.
<VirtualHost wordpress:80>
ServerAdmin webmaster@localhost
ServerName wordpress
DocumentRoot /var/www/wordpress
<Directory />
Options FollowSymLinks
AllowOverride None
</Directory>
<Directory /var/www/wordpress>
Options Indexes FollowSymLinks MultiViews
AllowOverride None
Order allow,deny
allow from all
</Directory>
ScriptAlias /cgi-bin/ /usr/lib/cgi-bin/
<Directory "/usr/lib/cgi-bin">
AllowOverride None
Options +ExecCGI -MultiViews +SymLinksIfOwnerMatch
Order allow,deny
Allow from all
</Directory>
ErrorLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/error.log
# Possible values include: debug, info, notice, warn, error, crit,
# alert, emerg.
LogLevel warn
CustomLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/access.log combined
Alias /doc/ "/usr/share/doc/"
<Directory "/usr/share/doc/">
Options Indexes MultiViews FollowSymLinks
AllowOverride None
Order deny,allow
Deny from all
Allow from 127.0.0.0/255.0.0.0 ::1/128
</Directory>
</VirtualHost>
You can then add “wordpress” to /etc/hosts (change the line that reads 127.0.0.1 localhost to 127.0.0.1 localhost wordpress) and use the address “http://wordpress” to access your site.

Apache needs to know about the site:

sudo a2ensite wordpress; sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 reload

Now with the letter “A” out of the way we can deal with the “M”. Most web applications need at least one database. Remember that MySQL password?

mysql -u root -p

A good example is installing WordPress. Download and extract the contents to /var/www/wordpress – remember the wordpress folder already exists so put the contents in there. Create a new database called “wordpress“, with a user called “wordpress” and a password of “wordpress” by entering each command at the prompt:

create database wordpress;
grant usage on wordpress.* to wordpress@localhost identified by 'wordpress';
grant all privileges on wordpress.* to wordpress@localhost;

Type “\q” to exit then open a browser and go to your site, for me that’s http://localhost/dougie.

So lastly we get on to the “P” – PHP. Apache will recognise and run PHP, however be aware of a caveat I’ve noticed in Ubuntu. If you try to use your system hostname instead of localhost in Firefox, it will try to download rather than run PHP files. I believe this is due to the system hostname resolving to 127.0.1.1, a solution to Debian bug #316099.

PHP applications often have their own installation scripts, which WordPress does. Enter the database details we just created on the WordPress install screen:

Once the rest of the screens are complete, you’ll have WordPress installed.

So to summarise:

1. Install a LAMP stack – sudo tasksel install lamp-server
2. Create a folder and set the correct permissions – sudo mkdir /var/www/wordpress; sudo chown :www-data wordpress; sudo chmod g+w wordpress
3. Download WordPress and put the contents in /var/www/wordpress
4. Open mysql:mysql -u root -p
5. Set up database: create database wordpress; grant usage on wordpress.* to wordpress@localhost identified by 'wordpress'; grant all privileges on wordpress.* to wordpress@localhost; \q
6. Run http://wordpress/install.php

So to recap, all we need to do to add an application is create a virtual host so Apache can serve it up; create a database for it to store data; and configure the application – often via a browser interface. Now you can hack away at those WordPress themes to your heart’s content.

More information is available from the Ubuntu Server Guide.

Mode-switching – method one

Thanks to OdyX (who maintains usb-modeswitch) this is the simplest method.

Open a terminal (Applications->Accessories->Terminal) and type:

sudo apt-get install usb-modeswitch usb-modeswitch-data

Mode-switching – method two

On inserting the device, if you open a terminal (Applications->Accessories->Terminal) and type “dmesg” you’ll see something like this:

The device has a small amount of storage space and identifies itself (on Windows) as a mass storage device, installs the driver and away you go. The problem is Ubuntu does what it is told to, it thinks its a mass storage device. The switch is never made in software because the software isn’t for Linux. We need to manually switch it using a little program that has been installed by default for a while now – “modem-modeswitch”. You need to pass it some parameters but we want the system to do this automatically when we insert the device – so we will configure a udev rule instead.

Open a new file to store the rule by typing “gksu gedit /etc/udev/rules.d/15-huawei-e1550.rules” and paste in the following code:

SUBSYSTEM=="usb",SYSFS{idProduct}=="1446",SYSFS{idVendor}=="12d1",RUN+="/lib/udev/modem-modeswitch --vendor 0x12d1 --product 0x1446 --type option-zerocd"

Save the file and close the editor. Remove and re-insert the device. You should notice that service providers icon has popped up on the desktop – don’t worry about it as it is just the storage part of the device being recognised.

Configuring the connection

If you now click on the network-manager icon in the notification area, you’ll see a new option, “New Mobile Broadband (GSM) connection”

Click it and on the splash screen click “Forward” and choose your country and operator. Mine is 3UK so I’ll pick “Britain (UK)”, “3″ and importantly from the next screen choose “Handsets”. Obviously this will require the correct information, so if your network is not listed and you cannot obtain the necessary values the please contact your provider. Click “Apply” and you should see the connection appear.