Installation is quite simple in Ubuntu 9.10

sudo apt-get install nautilus-image-converter

This will install the Image Converter extension to the Nautilus file manager. You will need restart GNOME in order for the changes to apply. If you are using a different distro, I’m sure you will be able to do a Google Search to find out how to install it.

After the installation its all a matter of browsing the folder where you have the photos through Nautilus.

• Select the photo(s) you want to resize.
• Right-click on the photos you selected. You will see the options to “Resize Images” and “Rotate Images”.
• Upon clicking them you will get options on how you would want to perform the operations.

Its one of those coolest apps I came across which does the simple things in a simple way. Love it..!!!

Few of my friends who switched to Ubuntu lately, asked me how to get LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) working in their desktops. Most of them have installed Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy Heron) so I planned to write a small guide on how to setup a LAMP development environment. This will require to have an Internet Connection since the installation will download the necessary packages from the repositories. I will also explain how to add Virtual Hosts so that we can setup different environments to each website we create. I will also explain on how to enable Apache modules such as Userdir and Rewrite. I would normally enable Userdir module on development environments because it allows me to quickly test my code in my home directory. Rewrite module will enable features like having Search Engine Friendly URLs if we can write few Rewrite rules in the .htacess file.

Getting LAMP installed is quite easy in Ubuntu 8.04. I will be using the command-line in this small guide.

Open command-line terminal by going to Applications -> Accessories -> Terminal

First Update the repositories

sudo apt-get update

Install Apache2 – PHP5 – MySQL5 in one go

sudo apt-get install apache2 php5 mysql-server-5.0

Installation will take a while depending on your Internet Connection speed to download the necessary packages. You will be prompted to enter the MySQL Server root password. Enter the password and that's it. Apache2, PHP5 and MySQL5 will now be installed in your computer.

Now open a Browser Window, most probably Firefox and in the address bar type http://localhost. You will get a message like It Works! in the browser which means Apache is successfully installed. The default webroot directory will be /var/www/ where you can place a phpinfo page to check whether PHP is installed successfully as well. But this directory is not writable by the user. So we might need to sudo and write to this directory. Later in this guide I will explain how to test files that resides in my home directory.

Create PHP info page to check whether the PHP installation was successful

sudo gedit /var/www/info.php

Copy the blow code in the editor.

1
2
3

<?php
phpinfo();
?>

Save the file and close the editor.

Now goto http://localhost/info.php. If you see the PHP Info page then PHP is also successfully installed.

Now we need to check whether MySQL is installed successfully as well. In the terminal type

mysql -h localhost -u root -p

Enter the root password you entered during the installation process. If you are able to successfully login and see the welcome massage and the MySQL command prompt, MySQL is also installed successfully.

I would then install PHPMyAdmin, a web based GUI to handle MySQL Databases.

Install PHPMyAdmin

sudo apt-get install phpmyadmin

You will be prompted to select the server type, select apache2.

We will then restart Apache to make the changes in effect

sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart

Now goto http://localhost/phpmyadmin/. If you see the PHPMyAdmin login page then it is also installed successfully.

Though we now have everything in place, saving files into /var/www/ can be an issue during the development coz the user doesn't have permissions to write to this directory. We can overcome this by setting permissions to the user to write to this directory. But I always prefer having Userdir module enabled. If I assume my username is spider, I can save my files in a folder called 'public_html' under my home directory (/home/spider/public_html) and call it from the browser using the following address in my browser http://localhost/~spider/. But for this to work UserDir module should be enabled in Apache.

Enable UserDir module in Apache

sudo a2enmod userdir

Restart Apache to make the changes in effect

sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart

Userdir module is now installed and working, so now we can save files in the public_html folder which you need to create in your home directory. But this method is good for testing small scripts. Its always advisable to create a Virtual Host for each project so that we can use a hostname for a website and have a directory apart from the default webroot associated with it. We can change certain behaviours while setting up a Virtual Host which allows us a better testing environment.

Setting up a Virtual Host

First we need to create a hostname associated with our local IP address. To do that we need to edit the hosts file

sudo gedit /etc/hosts

Add the following in a new line after the entry for localhost

127.0.0.1 myweb.local

Save the file and close the editor window.

myweb.local is our hostname where it can be any name except localhost

Now we need to setup a Virtual Host in Apache for myweb.local

We need to add a new file for the sites available for Apache

cd /etc/apache2/sites-available
sudo touch myweb
sudo gedit myweb

In the editor add the following lines.

<virtualHost *>
    ServerName myweb.local
    ServerAdmin webmaster@localhost
    DocumentRoot /home/spider/public_html/myweb/
 
    <directory /home/spider/public_html/myweb/>
        Options Indexes FollowSymLinks MultiViews
        AllowOverride All
        Order allow,deny
        allow from all
    </directory>
</virtualHost>

Save the file and close the editor window.

Make sure you have created this directory /home/spider/public_html/myweb/

Now we need to enable this site which is available in Apache. To enable the site simply run this command

sudo a2ensite myweb

Restart Apache to make the changes in effect

sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart

Thats it. We have our new website running. In your browser goto http://myweb.local. You will see the new website which is located in the directory we assigned to this Virtual Host.

If you need more websites such as this, you can repeat this process.

If you didn't notice, in the Directory settings I set 'AllowOverride All' because I need mod_rewrite to work in this site. But we need to enable Rewrite module for this to work. If you don't need to override these settings set it to 'AllowOverride None'

Enable Rewrite module in Apache

sudo a2enmod rewrite

Restart Apache to make the changes in effect

sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart

We now have mod_rewrite working as well. A .htaccess file with rewrite rules has to be placed in the root directory of this site to have Search Engine Friendly URLs working.

I hope this guide will help you to setup a LAMP development environment in Ubuntu 8.04. If you come across any issues please feel free to write to me using the comment box.

Happy Coding…

I loaded my OS of choice Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy Heron on this and everything went very smoothly except that I couldn't get the wireless working. By running lspci the wireless card was shown as Atheros Communications Inc. AR242x 802.11abg Wireless PCI Express Adapter which is an Atheros AR5007EG wireless card. The proprietary driver for Atheros was installed by Hardy but when I ran iwconfig this is what I got.

lo        no wireless extensions.
 
eth0      no wireless extensions.

Few google searches resulted me about madwifi. Madwifi is a team of volunteer developers working on Linux kernel drivers for Wireless LAN devices with Atheros chipsets. I got madwifi installed and got my wireless card working. Here is how I did it.

First I disabled both proprietary drivers in System -> Administration -> Hardware drivers.

Then in the command prompt I did the following

Get this version of madwifi

wget -c <a href="http://snapshots.madwifi.org/special/madwifi-ng-r2756+ar5007.tar.gz" target="_blank">http://snapshots.madwifi.org/special/madwifi-ng-r2756+ar5007.tar.gz</a>

Untar the file

tar xvf madwifi-ng-r2756+ar5007.tar.gz

Move inside the directory

cd madwifi-ng-r2756+ar5007

You might need build-essential if you haven't compiled anything before

sudo apt-get update && sudo aptitude install build-essential

Building madwifi and installing the modules

make
sudo make install
sudo modprobe ath_pci
sudo modprobe wlan_scan_sta

Loading module at boot

sudo gedit /etc/modules

Enter the line below in the last line of the file and save.

ath_pci

Thats it. I restarted the machine and ran iwconfig again to check

lo        no wireless extensions.
 
eth0      no wireless extensions.
 
wifi0     no wireless extensions.
 
ath0      IEEE 802.11g  ESSID:""  Nickname:""
          Mode:Managed  Frequency:2.437 GHz  Access Point: Not-Associated   
          Bit Rate:0 kb/s   Tx-Power:17 dBm   Sensitivity=1/1  
          Retry:off   RTS thr:off   Fragment thr:off
          Power Management:off
          Link Quality=0/70  Signal level=0 dBm  Noise level=0 dBm
          Rx invalid nwid:0  Rx invalid crypt:0  Rx invalid frag:0
          Tx excessive retries:0  Invalid misc:0   Missed beacon:0

As you can see its now showing that the wireless card is working properly. Thanks to madwifi.

When it came to my graphic card I had to use the ATI propriety driver to make full use of it. Since Hardy comes with compiz out of the box I managed to get the 3D desktop working without much hassle.

To get compiz working in Hardy there are two things to be done.

1. Goto System -> Preferences – Appearance and click Visual Effects tab. Then tick Extra to get the effects working.

2. Install the Compiz Settings Manager.

sudo apt-get install compizconfig-settings-manager

After installing you can goto System -> Preferences – Advanced Desktop Effects Settings to add/configure/remove effects related to compiz.

I also enabled Emerald themes to get out of the standard Gnome look. Here is how got emerald working.

sudo apt-get install emerald

Now if you goto System -> Preferences – Emerald Theme Manager you can configure an Emerald theme of your choice. By default it doesn't come with any themes so you need to download themes from Gnome-Look.

However you need to tell compiz to use Emerald as its Window Decorator. To do that goto System -> Preferences – Advanced Desktop Effects Settings and under Effects category click on the Window Decoration icon which will take you to its settings. In the 'Command' field delete whatever is in there and add this value to that field

emerald --replace.

Have fun..

I found a nice Emerald theme which kinda reflects the one used by Matt Farrell in the movie Die Hard 4.0. Here are few screeshots of my desktop.

3D desktop with compiz on Hardy

Desktop with new look theme

The author of the article says:

This was a tough list to winnow down, as Google's full product list is long and prodigious. In fact, we're still having regrets about leaving Patent Search, Google Moon, and Google Mars off the list. Update: I'm particularly regretful about not including Grand Central or Google SMS, too.

gksu "update-manager -c -d"

It opened up the update manager with the message that Ubuntu 6.10 is available for upgrade. There was about 1GB to be downloaded so I left it to upgrade and went to sleep. By next day morning I upgraded to edgy. It was not up to the expectations but there was more problems when I realized that my wireless card has stopped working. It was working fine under Breezy and Dapper. Over the last couple of weeks I have been going through the forums and have found out lot of people have come across lot of problems trying to upgrade from Dapper to Edgy. Wireless issues have been a common thing. Currently I'm settled with my Ethernet card though have to sort out the wireless issue. I even played around with ndiswrapper but have few issues with it. I might have to install edgy freshly if I'm unable to fix it.

sudo dpkg-reconfigure -phigh xserver-xorg

But that didn't help and was wondering what could have gone wrong. It was working well till I shut it down without any problems when I left work today evening. Suddenly I realised that I installed some updates via the Update Manager and it was the xserver-xorg update that I installed. Good thing I didn't update it on my desktop which also runs Ubuntu Dapper Drake. When I checked the Ubuntu Community blogs I found out that there is a problem with this update. And the best part is I found the solution for it and fixed it as well. If you haven't updated it please don't do it for now. If u have done already here are the links where I found the solution.

Latest Dapper xserver-xorg upgrade might break the xserver

This is how I fixed it since xserver-xorg-core_1.0.2-0ubuntu10.4_i386.deb was not uploaded to the Ubuntu Servers.

HOWTO solve the problem

In the meantime there are Dapper Release Parties happening all over the world and there is one Dapper Release Party here in Sri Lanka as well. Cool ha?

Ubuntu is my first experience for a Debian based distro. I have used Redhat since 6.3 and then upto 9 and after that have tried out Fedora Core 1 to Fedora Core 3. But not that much on the Desktop. I never got settled with it. But as a Server I found it very effective.

So Why picked Ubuntu for Desktop?

There was this buzz about Ubuntu being a great Desktop. There was lot of hype around it. After most of my friends suggested that its really suited for desktop I got it installed. I'm amazed..

I love the way it handles users. By default the root account is locked. Using sudo the user will be able to run administrative commands. The thing I like about this is that I don't need to su and it also prevents from crazy things happening when logged in as root. The root account can be enabled but not advisable. Read More about it.

Package Management. Its Debian based so uses apt. Synaptic Package Manager ,the GUI for apt is very handy. And Automatix installed all the stuff I need for a perfect desktop.

How perfect was the switch?

I had concerns for switching to a Linux desktop. I'm mainly a PHP/MySQL developer. So it is the platform I need to be in. Infact I was in the wrong place earlier. Now I perfectly fit in to the LAMP. I was using Macromedia Dreamweaver as my editor earlier coz I also have to work a lot on the HTML/XHTML pages. Quanta Plus is a perfect alternate. I did try out Screem and Nvu. Seems to fit in perfectly. Currently using gedit as the phpeditor. Lately being playing around with jEdit and it seems a perfect editor.

I was using Mozilla Thunderbird as my Email client. So I was able to restore all my mails without any difficulty. I'm not really a newbie to Linux so the switch didn't effect me that much. Infact I'm having fun.

Few issues I came across

It was bundled with Mozilla Firefox 1.0.7. This is how I installed the new version of Mozilla Firefox 1.5.2.

Using the Synaptic Package Manager I got installed Apache2-PHP4-MySQL and with that installed phpMyAdmin as well just to try out. But for some reason PHP scripts were not parsed. I really didn't try to dig into it and felt comfortable compiling them to my needs. When I tried to remove them phpMyAdmin couldn't remove itself and on the Synaptic Package Manager it showed phpMyAdmin as a broken package. And due to this the rest of the packages I wanted to removed were not removed. And after doing some googling this is how I was able to get rid of it by modifying the installation script of phpMyAdmin.

Created a backup of the script

 
nazly@ubuntu:~$ cd /var/lib/dpkg/info/
 
nazly@ubuntu:/var/lib/dpkg/info$ sudo cp phpmyadmin.prerm phpmyadmin.prerm.orig

Edit the script file

 
nazly@ubuntu:/var/lib/dpkg/info$ sudo gedit phpmyadmin.prerm

And commented line 12 by adding a # infront of it and saved the file.

Then used apt-get to remove phpMyAdmin

 
nazly@ubuntu:/var/lib/dpkg/info$ sudo apt-get remove phpmyadmin

After that Synaptic Package Manager didn't show the phpMyAdmin package as broken and I was able to remove the rest of the packages.

I'm able to connect to my PC with my Nokia 6230i via Bluetooth as I didn't have to install any driver as such.

So as far as I'm concerned I'm not missing anything at all.. I'm very much satisfied with myself that I'm doing the right thing as I always had this passion for Free & OpenSource software.

"free" as in "free speech," not as in "free beer."

The new graphical installer will be a great addition to Ubuntu. There is also seem to be great improvement in the UI. Gotta try it out.