Archive for 'Linux'

One of the biggest pains when designing a website is ensuring cross-browser compatibility. When it comes to HTML this is not too much of a problem, however javascript and CSS are. The layout in one browser may look completely different in another. Unfortunately, Microsoft’s Internet Explorer is not very CSS compliant, so it is always a good idea to test a design in as many websites as possible.

However, this is not always so easy if a web browser, in particular Internet Explorer, is unavailable for the operating system you use, which is the case for users of Linux, BSD and any other non-Windows OS.

Fortunately, though, for Linux users there is a solution:

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I was recently looking for a plugin for Amarok (it seems to be the best mp3 player provided with openSUSE 10.2) which will display the song title and artist of the music track I’m currently listening to in Pidgin’s status. After spending some time researching available plugins and reading user comments I found AmarokPidgin at KDE-Apps.org which does what I want and appeared to have straight-forward installation.

So, I installed the plugin and once up-and-running it worked like a charm. However, the plugin was unable to generate the default configuration so I had to do this manually. Just copy the config file below in to a text editor and save it to ~/.kde/share/apps/amarok/scripts-data/ as AmarokPidgin.ini.

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I recently needed to set up some cron jobs for new scripts I had been developing and found an ugly blue screen when editing the cron file with crontab -e (which opens the current user’s cron file in the default editor). I had been expecting vim (Vi Improved) but instead I was faced with "joe", which is not my editor of choice.

Fortunately, though, it is a simple enough task to change which editor is used when editing cron jobs. For anyone else in the same situation as myself, instructions are provided below on how to change the default editor. Note: This changes the editor used by all software which respects the EDITOR variable.

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I recently had some problems getting mod_rewrite to work but in the end I got there. Although the module was loading, the rewrite rules were not taking affect and I was just getting 404s.

For others having the same problem, firstly check that the module is set to be loaded by apache in the configuration file. On openSUSE 10.2 this is in the file /etc/apache2/sysconfig.d/loadmodule.conf and specifically the line:

LoadModule rewrite_module        /usr/lib/apache2-prefork/mod_rewrite.so

Additionally, the file /etc/sysconfig/apache2 should have rewrite in the line beginning:

APACHE_MODULES=

If you’re not using openSUSE 10.2 then check the documentation coming with your distribution for where module loads need to be located. Finally, restart apache with one of the following commands (depending upon your Linux distribution) as root in a console/xterm:

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I had finally got around to writing some php scripts again but them came across a big stumbling block: apache2/php5 on opensuse 10.2 refused to read my custom php.ini file. I tried placing it in public_html, virtualhost folders and other locations however php5 still refused to read it. Finally, I edited the directory section of the virtual host I’d created and added the required php options there. For anyone with a similar problem, here is an example of a vhost with php options:

Listen 8090
<VirtualHost _default_:8090>
DocumentRoot "/path/to/files"
<Directory "/path/to/files">
Options Indexes FollowSymLinks MultiViews
AllowOverride None
Order allow,deny
Allow from all
<IfModule mod_php5.c>
php_value include_path ".:/patch/to/includes:/usr/share/php5"
php_value session.cache_expire "240"
</IfModule>
</Directory>
<IfModule mod_dir.c>
DirectoryIndex index.php index.html
</IfModule>
</VirtualHost>

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