Fixed: Can’t Resize Uploaded Images in WordPress
Here's one with an easy fix. If you've just installed WordPress on your server and can upload images but WordPress doesn't let you resize them in the same form, SSH in to your server and do the following:
yum install php-gd
service httpd restart
And you're done! ...At least, as long as you're using an RHEL-compatible Linux distro. If not, use your package manager of choice, or manually find and load the php-gd extension!
Android: Force Terminal Emulator to Open the BASH Shell as Root
I love my Android phone, but the root side of it still has some quirks. The default shell, for example, is pretty bare-bones. Fortunately, there are ROMs out there like CyanogenMod that help with that side of things by providing little extras like, for example, the BASH shell. BASH is incredibly handy on an Android phone as the default shell doesn't allow you to scroll back through your command history using the track ball.
So while BASH is included in some ROMs, it's not the default shell. Typically, I've been using ConnectBot (available on the Android Market) which works well, however I'd usually end up starting out every session like this:
su -c bash
It's only one line, but really, it's annoying to have to type it out every time. I'm in the IT field, so my nature is to be lazy and automate everything. Enter Terminal Emulator.
Available for free from the Android Market, Terminal Emulator is very basic. It doesn't allow you to SSH to remote systems or anything like that - instead, it just immediately opens a local shell. As an added bonus, the preferences let you specify the Command Line to the shell executable.
I thought this was my answer. I set the Command Line preference to "/system/xbin/bash -" (the location on CyanogenMod 5.x.x -- this may differ depending on your ROM. Make sure the path is correct before hand, as if you set it incorrectly it's nearly impossible to get Terminal Emulator back up and running) and re-launched it.
Success! I was in the BASH shell! However, I wasn't root, and this did cause a problem. As soon as I typed su to become root, my shell was changed back to the default one. After doing a little more digging, though, I found my solution.
In the Terminal Emulator preferences, there's another option for Initial Command - Terminal Emulator will execute this immediately on open. So, I inserted the line I was using in ConnectBot (su -c bash) and voilà! Terminal Emulator now immediately opens with a BASH shell as root.
The TL;DR version: Install Terminal Emulator from the Android Market, open it, hit the Menu button, then Preferences. Tap Initial Command and enter su -c root -- now it will always open with BASH running as root.
Extra Note: If you are using an Android phone without a physical keyboard, simply hold the Menu button on your phone for a few seconds in Terminal Emulator to force the virtual keyboard to appear.
UPDATE: As it turns out, you can do this in ConnectBot as well. Tap-and-hold on the local connection, then choose 'Edit Host' and 'Post-login automation'. Note that if you do this, though, ConnectBot will enter the command, but you still have to press enter to active it.
Short: Quantum Linux
Due to a failed kernel upgrade earlier today, I decided to wipe my MSI Wind and start over with the LXDE spin of Fedora 12. After the install, I went through installing my favourite packages, and notice the following while yum processed the dependencies for VLC:
schroedinger i686 1.0.8-3.fc12 updates 208k
Closer inspection revealed the package to be a codec, but that only led to further questions. Does this package transport video, and then only determine whether it is encoded/decoded when your media player first tries to render it? Does the process involve acid, or radioactive material? Does it work with Boxee?
This has been your annual dose of quantum humour. I now return you to your Superbowl Sunday. Thank you.
Short: MSI Wind U123 and Fedora 12 Wifi
My MSI Wind U123 has an 802.11n wifi card that uses the Ath9k driver. Although it's technically supported by the 2.6.31 kernel used by Fedora 12, it constantly drops it's signal and often refuses to connect to my access point.
I'm happy to report, however, that after I manually compiled the 2.6.32 kernel and booted with it, the wireless card works perfectly!
Unfortunately, it seems the 2.6.32 kernel also breaks a few things - booting takes 3 minutes, and the machine hard locks on with a black screen if you close the lid. I'm going to try to iron out those issues, but overall I'm pleased with the results.
Edit: I re-installed Fedora 12, then updated to the 2.6.32.1 kernel using the FC13 rpm's from http://mirror.kernel.org - works like a charm now. I still can't close the lid unless I have the action set to 'do nothing', but I can deal with that.
Additional Edit (02/15/2010): I've enabled the Rawhide repo and set it to only include kernel* and dependencies. The 2.6.33 RC chain works perfectly.
Short: NetworkManager, Bah!
I have a love-hate relationship with NetworkManager on Fedora. I love it on my netbook for the ease it provides when trying to connect to wireless networks. However, I hate it on my dual-NIC workstation at work as it always mangles the connections and tries to route traffic through eth1 when eth0 is the primary network. As such, my favourite commands of the moment are:
chkconfig NetworkManager off
chkconfig network on
Then, a quick change to
/etc/resolv.conf
/etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0
/etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth1
in order to add the correct nameservers, gateway, and IP addresses, and life is good!
MSI Wind/Fedora 12 Beta – Still Pulsing (Updated)
I like bleeding-edge technology. The newer, the better, as there are usually fun little things to discover and rarely does anything bleeding-edge actually work perfectly, giving me ample opportunity to mess around with things.
Enter Fedora 12. I've played with the initial Alpha release, several of the Snap releases, and as of this morning, the Beta release. So far, at least as far as my MSI Wind 123 goes, they're all unusable.
The biggest problem so far is the display - as soon as GDM kicks in, prior to the login screen loading, the screen starts to 'pulse'. To be more specific, if you were to tap the 'Brightness Up' and 'Brightness Down' keys fairly quickly between two different levels, you'd get the same effect. This continues incessantly, and makes it impossible to use the GUI. If I boot in runlevel 3 (direct-to-console), everything is fine, so the issue is restricted to Xorg.
As far as the beta goes, there's been a little regression. In the Alpha and Snap releases, I was able to get all the way to the desktop, despite the pulsing display. Now, with the beta, it takes just over 2 minutes just to get past the boot animation, and then it stalls before the login screen loads. Whether or not this has anything to do with the fact this is a livecd on a USB stick (made with the Fedora live-usbcreator for Windows, with persistent overlay), I'm not sure. I'll probably download another spin (maybe the KDE version) and see if I have any more luck.
Update: Progess! On a whim, I removed rhgb from the kernel line when booting (press Tab to cancel automatic boot, and then again to edit boot options) and was actually able to get to the desktop, albeit with no improvement to the speed of things. The screen still pulses, however I did notice something interesting: while the screen pulses (briefly before the login screen appears, then it stops until you choose a user, and then it starts again), if I switch to another terminal (CTRL+ALT+F2, for example), the login name starts to fill with "^@" repeated several times, and then stops. If I then switch back to the GDM terminal (CTRL+ALT+F1), the pulsing stops.
At least that gives me something to go on.
Moblin 2 Beta: A Step in the Right Direction (Updated)
And while it may be a step in the write direction, there are a few little things that just bug me about the current iteration of the Moblin netbook distribution.
- Power Button - Where is it? The short answer is there isn't one - your only option is to simply use the physical power button on your netbook. Also, the shutdown terminal command is strangely absent. Thankfully, though, the reboot command is still there. It would be excellent if Shutdown/Reboot/Sleep were included in the options presented when you click the battery status icon.
- myzone - There's no way to customize the myzone tab, which is the default location on start up. You get three columns, and no control of them or choice in adding other quick content. Not very handy for a start page, in my opinion.
- Persistence - The detailed instructions page that tells you how to put Moblin on a flash drive/SD card/whatever doesn't explain how to add a persistence layer so that your changes survive a reboot. All of the instructions/utilities supplied simply bite-copy the image to your device and that's that. Supposedly you can use the Fedora LiveUSB Creator to do this, but I've yet to try it. Having an official utility would help, and something that I hope to see coming down the road.
So for the time being, Moblin is something that's neat to play around in - it has an amazing interface that's refreshing and definitely easy to use for Linux (or computer-in-general) newbies - but still has some growing to do before I'd use it in place of a full distribution.
With any luck, they'll work on these things for the final version of Moblin 2, or if not that, than hopefully for Moblin 3.
Edit: Also useful information, the root password for Moblin 2 is 'moblin'. And for some reason, although sudo is installed by default, the standard user (also 'moblin') isn't in the /etc/sudoers file, so you can't use sudo unless you manually add it. That needs to get fixed as well.
Fedora 11 on the MSI Wind
I recently picked up an MSI Wind U123, and have been doing my usual try-every-operating-system-I-can-find-and-see-what-happens tests. Along the way, I've tried Windows XP (was installed by MSI, lasted a few minutes before I got rid of it), Windows 7 (worked fine out-of-box, no extra drivers needed), Moblin v2 (not a big fan of the UI, but ran very well from an 8GB SDHC card), Fedora 12 (big issues with this one, but it's only an Alpha release), and now I'm at Fedora 11.
I dumped the Live image of Fedora 11 (Gnome desktop manager) on to my SD card (the U123 supports booting from SD cards, something my old Acer AspireONE couldn't do), and installed it in less than 10 minutes, boot times included. Almost everything works out-of-box, however the Gnome UI was horrifically huge. Most windows would fill the screen and beyond, making it impossible to see buttons, let alone click them.
The solution? Change the default DPI. To do this, login, then click the System menu, followed by Preferences and Appearance. In the resulting window, click the Fonts tab, then the Details button at the bottom. In the new window, change Resolution to 96 and hit Enter on your keyboard (as the Close button is just out-of-view). Everything should be back to normal.
In addition to this, I also changed all of the font sizes to 8, but that isn't strictly necessary - I just like to get as much on the screen as I can.
Beyond that, everything else works perfectly, including sound, wireless, the SD card reader, and even the webcam.
Chrome OS: Insert Cloud Pun Here
So there's been a lot of news lately about Google's newly announced operating system cleverly called 'Chrome OS'. What is it? In short, it's a bare-bones Linux distribution (yes, it uses a Linux kernel for both the ARM and x86 versions) that puts focus on web applications. What does this mean to the consumer? Probably not a whole lot.
Here's the thing: there's a cycle that goes on between people/businesses having Desktop Systems and Thin Clients. This has been going on for ages. With a desktop system (which most people are used to), everything is literally at your finger tips. All of the software is installed on your local computer, and that's where you do most of your work. If you're in a business, chances are you save your files on to a remote server, but that's typically in the same building.
With Thin Clients, things are a little different. In days of old, you had a terminal, which consisted of a monitor and keyboard. This was networked to a mainframe-type setup, which housed everything. These days, Thin Clients typically have a very minimal operating system (either something *nix based, or Windows CE) that allows you to use Citrix, Remote Desktop (terminal services), etc... to connect to a server that contains all of your apps. Not a lot of difference.
Chrome OS, from everything that's been said, definitely appears to be of the Thin Client sort - basically, you boot it up and you're on the web. Done. Likely you'll be able to muck about with installation, and it will hopefully still support Offline applications, however the goal appears simple: once you're connected, you'll be using Google Apps. Yep, you'll be in the 'cloud', with all of the benefits and problems that go with it.
Depending on your needs, this is all well and good. If you have a broadband connection, you're laughing. If you have a netbook, the target platform, this is supposed to be Nir-freaking-vana. However, I'm not convinced. Not yet, anyways.
The problem is, if this thing were to launch right now, I can't imagine it would do horribly well. With cell phones capable of tethering, 3G USB sticks, and WiFi hotspots everywhere, internet access really isn't a problem. And now that netbooks have matured and are actually usable (my 8GB SSD Acer AspireOne proves that it doesn't pay to be an early adopter) and Windows 7 nearly out the door, what's the point of yet-another-OS?
The pre-releases of Windows 7 run amazing well on netbooks (there are even rumors that Microsoft is making an ARM port of it). Fedora 11 is brilliant (even on my slow-as-hell AspireOne), and I've heard that Ubuntu rocks the platform. Intel is pushing Moblin (I've tried it, and I really don't care for the UI). Even OS X runs well, according to the Hackint0sh crowd. All that said, why is Google bothering with making an OS of it's own? Will it be a fork of one of the above distros? Will it retain binary compatibility with it's upstream brothers? Until it's out, we won't know for sure.
All that I can say is that I don't think it deserves the hype. We need to sit back, wait for Google to bless us with a beta, and then start hailing it as the best think since sliced bread or just another OS.
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