Getting back to basics
Posted on December 31, 2002
As I am working on Mocha2, I am realizing just that I don’t know as much as I thought I did :-) When I learned HTML, it was mostly from pieces I picked up here and there, although I did buy an O’Reilly book to help me fill in the gaps. However, even with the book, I learned just enough to make it look okay. I could do bold, and italics, and underlines. I could add images and make links. The very basic of HTML knowledge. The HTML stuff I didn’t know was minutiae. Today, I installed the Bluefish web editor on my PC. It’s not WYSIWYG, but it has a lot of cool tools. I figured this would be a good time to learn some of the HTML that I previously overlooked. So I started fooling around with tables and cascading style sheets. I still have a ways to go with them yet, but I at least have an idea of what is going on, and how things are done.
Mocha2 work continues
Posted on December 30, 2002
Now that I seem to have Slackware under control, I am starting to work on Mocha2 – again. I wrestled with Apache, MySQL, and PHP on my PC today, and I downloaded the Mocha2 area onto it so I can begin working on it without having to FTP everything back and forth (That gets old quick).
It looks like I will have a B2 blog front end, forums, a gallery, and a journal for the longer rants and thoughts. I have to do some serious work to the database, because all of these things are designed to work independently of one another, so each one has it’s own login, etc. A littel work to be done there.
Playing with Slackware
Posted on December 24, 2002
I guess I got a little ahead of myself in saying I was installing Debian. Sure, that was the intention, but after trying to install it so many times without success I gave up :-(
I ended up installing Slackware, which is another ‘not-for-the-faint-of-heart’ distribution. On the one hand it’s pretty cool. It’s only one CD, so there isn’t a ton of crap included with the distribution. On the other hand, there is a lot of stuff missing that I took for granted when using SuSE and Mandrake. (Click on Read More to read more) Slackware is another non-commercial distribution, like Debian, though it is a bit smaller (in popularity and probably size, too). It touts itself as being the most “Unix-like” Linux distribution, for what that’s worth.
Like Debian, it was a text-based install (as opposed to the graphic installs of SuSE and Mandrake). Since I never actually got Debian fuly installed, that’s about the only comparison I can make. Actually, it downloaded as 655MB, so I had to use a 700MB/80min CD-R, which I didn’t have to do with Debian.
At any rate, I finally got it installed. I rebooted the system, and came across the first difference between SuSE, etc, and Slackware. LILO (the Linux Loader), is text based, not graphic. Not a big thing, but different. I hit enter, and let it load Linux.
Then I came across the second difference between Slackware and the other distros. After it loaded, it ended up in the console, instead of automatically starting Xfree. That means I was just at the login prompt. No swanky window manager login here. I logged in as root, figuring I would have some work to do. It said I had mail, which typically means there is a “Welcome to this distro” email. I skipped reading the email and typed ‘startx’. The screen went blank. Hmmm. That’s not good. I reboot, and go through it all again, but this time I read the email, which actually had some tips in setting up Xfree.
I go through the xf86config program to setup X, but I apparently made a couple of mistakes, or didn’t pay that close of attention, because when I typed ‘startx’ again, it only showed me part of the screen at any one time. I could use the mouse to go down and see the Kicker panel, or go up to see a few icons, so I wasn’t totally hampered by this odd problem. I also didn’t have any network, and the only thing that KDE showed me to connect to the internet was KPPP, which is a dial-up program.
I used my laptop to get some more info on my monitor and check out updated drivers for my video card. I also looked and RP-PPPoE (Roaring Penguin PPP over Ethernet). The video drivers were too big to fit on a diskette, but the RP-PPPoE was only around 300K. I popped that on a floppy and then put it on Slackware. I typed ‘go-gui’ and it built with no problems. I entered the data for my DSL account, and I was extremely suprised when it went. FWIW, that means RP-PPPoE is using eth0 (the ethernet card), even though the KDE Control Center doesn’t see it. One problem solved.
Next problem to solve was the funky resolution/video problem. Now that I had Slackware on the net, I grabbed the updated drivers for my video card and installed those. I re-ran xf86config and paid attention this time ;-) Now I know I can change resolutions just by hitting ctrl-alt-+, and I can kill xserver by hitting ctrl-alt-bksp. Second problem solved.
Now, it’s late, and that’s all of the problems I intend to tackle for the day. I got it installed, which makes me once again feel confident in my |33+ 5k1llz :-) Tomorrow (today), I go “shopping” on Freshmeat and SourceForge for more software. Now that I installed this system, I have well over 30 gigabytes of space to fill up. Gotta do something with it.
One final note: I learned Linux by using Mandrake, because it was (and still is) a good distribution for people coming from Windows. With SuSE, I learned “there is more than one way to do that.” It taught me there are substantial differences between the distributions, and it opened my eyes to a more global outlook. Slackware will (probably) strengthen my skills with Linux and computers, because it is a very basic distribution, and will require me to do a lot of work to get it to where I want it.
Keep an eye out for more details
Maybe now I can work on the Mocha2 website :-)
Playing with Debian
Posted on December 22, 2002
Over the past week or so, my main PC has been giving me some minor annoyances. So I decided to take the opportunity to explore some of the other Linux distros out there. In the past, I’ve used Mandrake and at the moment I’m using SuSE 8.0. Since I’ve been using Linux for a while now, I wanted a change of pace. I pondered Slackware, which I understand is a good distro for someone who is experienced with Linux. I checked out Ibiblio and LinuxISO for information about the different flavors of Linux and BSD. In the end, I ended up going with Debian. Debian is a distribution that is not for beginners (at least by reputation). It is non-commercial and run solely by volunteers. It’s not the only non-commercial distrbution, but it is the largest.
Since I was looking for a winter project (aside from Mocha2), Debian looked like a good option. Step one was downloading the ISO images and burning them onto CD. This was kind of a pain in the ass.
The first one I burned, I ended up with one big ISO file burned to CD. This means it isn’t readable by the computer. So The next thing I did was “mount” the ISO image to an empty directory, and then used a CD writing software to “master” the track and make it’s own ISO image, which it would then burn to a CD. This kind of worked, in that I could mount the CD and see the files, but for some reason it wasn’t bootable. I scratched my head and tried something else.
I went to DebianHelp and some other sites, before I found out I was more or less screwed up in the way I was burning the CD’s. The ISO image is an already mastered CD. Most of the CD writing software I was using wanted to create thir own ISO’s, rather tha taking one that was ready to burn. I ended up using the advanced options tab in KreateCD to make it burn an ISO image like it was meant to be burned.
With a bootable CD in hand, I rebooted the system and was surprised when the computer actually recognized it as a bootable CD. I started going through the install process, which wasn’t as hard as I though it would be. At least until I came up to the section where it starts to install the base system. It starts going through the base install, then tells me that the iptables package is corrupt. That’s strange, I thought. I ran md5sums and compared what I had with what was on the website and they were the same (MD5SUM is kind of like an error checking mechanism. If the numbers don’t match, then the downloaded image is corrupt in some way). Of course, this posed a minor problem. My only CD-RW is on the PC I was installing Debian on. And of course, since the Debian Installer had already made the new partitions, that meant I would have to reinstall SuSE, in order to download and burn new CD’s. Which is where I am now.
Debian has several types of installions. There is the generic boot-US and generic boot-NON US. In addition, there is the “vanilla” installation, the compact install, the IDEPCI install, and the BD2.4 install which has the Linux 2.4 kernel. Originally, I downloaded the generic US version, but since that came up with a problem, I decided it would be a wise idea to download and burn a few more CD’s, with different images, so it will be more likely to install correctly. I decided to download the generic NON US version, the plain vanilla CD, and the 2.4 CD. I may also grab the net-install CD. That one just installs a basic system, and then allows for downloading the rest once the system is set up. I guess the idea behind this is you have greater control over what is installed.
Anyway, once I get Debian installed, I will be fooling around with different things on it. I will have to learn where things are, and at least try to make it somewat similar to what my PC looked like with SuSE. Luckily, I backed up all of the important stuff, like my website stuff and the databases. I also backed up Kmail and Evolution (which is important if you’ve ever lost important emails due to a computer crash). Over at SourceForge I saw (and will probably install) a package called CDBackup. Essentially, it is supposed to take your important files and remind you to back them up (burn to CD). It keeps track of what’s changed or been added since the last backup. Sounds cool, not to mention very useful.
Other than that, the only thing I think I might like to try out is Slash. I’ve tried it before and had problems with it, so I’m hoping that getting it working on a new DIstro will be easier, especially since Debian is supposed to be what Slashdot uses.
Well, back to the downloading. I post how it all goes soon.
Gallery updated
Posted on December 1, 2002
Well, I just added a whole bunch of new photos to the e-gallery. Just click on eGallery at the left, and then click on Photos. There are 56 photos in the database, and all but 3 were added last night. Enjoy.
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