Trent Richardson » Linux

Ready or Not, Here Ubuntu Comes!

trent — Tue, 27 Apr 2010 01:59:07 +0000

As many of you know I use Ubuntu on a daily basis. All of my web development is done with it, unless I’m forced to develop something on a Winders platform. It seems though Ubuntu 10.04 is already upon us and I’ve hardly noticed! Well.. it’s nearly here..

Ubuntu has upgraded Gnome, the kernel, new themes, adding Gwibber for social networking, and also a new online music store. Seems to me like they’re trying to push their way in to the hip crowd. All sounds good to me as long as I have gEdit! I’ve not figured out why I just can’t be pleased with the themes. Maybe they just take time to grow on me? Anyway, its almost here, don’t forget to upgrade! Do any of you readers use Ubuntu? Or am I the odd ball?

Gedit PHP Completion and Collaboration

trent — Fri, 19 Feb 2010 12:50:24 +0000

If you’re a gEdit fan like I am you will be excited to see these plugins by Jesse van den Kieboom. First off a php completion plugin. This is something I’ve been hoping to find for quite some time. You can find it over at GitHub. The second thing is Collaboration. While I haven’t played with this personally I watched the video and it looks pretty sweet:

I believe Coda already has this feature, so its nice to see it show up in gEdit, which has become my editor of choice lately.

How To Set JAVA_HOME in Ubuntu

trent — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 12:46:21 +0000

This post is more for my memory than anything. I always forget and need to dig around to figure out how (or more importantly “where”) to set JAVA_HOME in Ubuntu. It’s pretty simple.

Find the location of your jvm. ex: /usr/lib/jvm/java-6-sun/
Add a line to your environment file:
```
sudo pico /etc/environment
```
Then just add the following to the end (or whatever the location of your jvm was):
```
JAVA_HOME=/usr/lib/jvm/java-6-sun/
```
Log out, and log back in.
Open a terminal and run “echo $JAVA_HOME”, which should give you /usr/lib/jvm/java-6-sun/

Installing Memcached on Ubuntu for PHP

trent — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 23:26:46 +0000

I’ve been playing around with caching and php, and thought I’d give a little insight on installing memcached on Ubuntu, and enable php-memcached. First start out by opening up your Synaptic Package Manager, search for “php memcached”. Select and install “memcached” and “php5-memcache”

Now everything should be installed. Restart Apache for php to recognize the new extension:


sudo apache2ctl restart

Now if you run a php script with phpinfo(); you should see a new section for memcached.

Next you will need to start memcache server, but before you attempt, I’ll let you know you’re going to get the following error: Starting memcached: memcached disabled in /etc/default/memcached. By default memcache installs with it’s startup script disabled(why I don’t know). So we need to start her up. All you have to do is open it’s config file and change one setting (there are comments in the file to indicate what to do):


sudo pico /etc/default/memcached

Now you will be able to edit the file. Set ENABLE_MEMCACHED=yes

Finally start memcached:


sudo /etc/init.d/memcached start

Now you should be able to cache! Also one final note. The default port should be 11211.

Connect to SQL Server from Ubuntu: Part II

trent — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 12:34:20 +0000

A few posts ago I explained how you can connect Ubuntu to SQL Server for PHP. All worked well until you tried to execute stored procedures. (It worked fine if you wrote the query, but not so much with mssql_execute() function). It would result in an error like this:

Warning: mssql_execute() [function.mssql-execute]: stored procedure execution failed

Well I did a little searching around and found out it appears to be a freetds issue, where you need to alter the freetds.conf file. This article tells you the correct config (tds version = 8.0 is the secret I believe), however it tells you the wrong location of freetds.conf for Ubuntu. Within Ubuntu you will find this file in /etc/freetds/freetds.conf. You will need to add the following (with your host and port of course):


host = xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx
port = 1433
tds version = 8.0

In my file I already had a [global] section and I just added it into there. After saving these settings into that file I was then able to call my stored procedures with no problem!

Connect to SQL Server from Ubuntu

trent — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 12:59:30 +0000

Installing the php5-mssql package in Ubuntu is not as obvious as it should be. I was unable to find it in Synaptic nor apt-get at first. From the install it appears that the package php5-mssql is a virtual package, which really points to php5-sybase. To install php5-mssql for Ubuntu note that there are two methods.

Method 1: Open up Synaptic Package Manager, search for and install “php5-sybase”

Method 2: Open up a terminal and run:


aptitude install php5-mssql

If you read the progress in the terminal you will see it refer to the php5-sybase package and indicates that php5-mssql is simply a virtual package. You might notice too that the freetds package is also installed. After my install I also had to restart apache. Simple as that!

Handy gEdit Snippet How To: Comment

trent — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 23:07:45 +0000

I regularly use gEdit but up until recently I have never messed with Snippets. Many editors support Snippets in some fashion or another. So I thought I would share a quick Snippet with you and how to create it. Much of my time is spent with ColdFusion and CFEclipse. There you may know about the Ctrl+Shift+M comment snippet, but it would be nice if gEdit had this functionality for php, javascript, and css. Well here is how to implement it with gEdit. First off open gEdit. If you don’t have the Snippets plugin installed just go to Edit->Preferences->Plugins and check the Snippets plugin.

Now we can open our Snippet Manager by going to Tools->Manage Snippets. A large window opens. Our languages are listed down the left hand side, click to expand PHP. Now click the button to add a new Snippet. I named mine “/* comment */”. On the right column you will have a large text area to type your snippet code. Enter the following:


/* $GEDIT_SELECTED_TEXT$0 */

And click into the Shortcut Key Field and press the key combination “Ctrl+Shift+M”. It should resemble the following:

Thats it! Now in your code you can highlight a selection and press the Ctrl+Shift+M keys and comment out that section of code. I’ll briefly explain the syntax of the snippet. $GEDIT_SELECTED_TEXT is a variable gEdit supplies to you. If you have nothing selected it will be an empty string. $0 is the end place holder. When the snippet is finished executing you cursor will wind up here. You can also use Python , but the easiest way to learn the snippets is to dig right into the ones provided by default, or to read up on them at GNOME Live. Enjoy!

Ubuntu 9.10 is Almost Here!

trent — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 23:47:35 +0000

The title says it all! Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Koala) is on the way in a couple weeks and I can’t wait to get my hands on the final version. A couple notable features will be Empathy replacing Pigeon and ext4 file system by default among many other advancements!

Fancy New Opera 10 in Ubuntu

trent — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 00:01:03 +0000

I fired up Opera this evening and was presented with an alert of a new version. I was eager to see what was new so I downloaded the new version and WOW! The linux version got a nice new make over! I’ve always been an opera fan, though some of the tools for Firefox keep pulling me back. I’m torn between the two! Here is the screenshot of what she looks like:

The tab bar now can be resized to show mini screenshots which is pretty awesome. And as always I love opera for its “small screen” view for mobile testing!

Mozilla Fennec in Jaunty 9.04

trent — Wed, 06 May 2009 16:15:27 +0000

While messing around with some mobile web development I decided to check Synaptic for “mobile browsers”. Sure enough the results were pleasing. Topping the list was Mozilla Fennec, the new mobile version of Firefox. Right away I installed and I now have a mobile emulator for Fennec right on my desktop. It does seem a bit buggy, but that is expected until its final release. None the less Fennec will help with your mobile development on Ubuntu.

Tip of the day: When in need of applications always check Synaptic before downloading.