ejhildreth's Blog - rants, raves, and occasional tips

Day two of running Kubuntu Hardy Heron revealed a minor issues: my VirtualBox wouldn't run. VirtualBox appeared to open up fine, until I selected one of my virtual machines to run. It tried to load it, but errored out because it couldn't find the VM files on the system. I'm sure this stemmed from the upgrade process from Gutsy Gibbon and how it rewrites files. The fix was really easy. I simply reinstalled the Deb package and alls good again!

Note: I use the Deb package directly from Innotek, not the one in the Kubuntu repository. At the time of this writing, they only had a Gutsy Gibbon version, but it seems to work just fine on Hardy Heron.

Well, I upgraded my system from Kubuntu Fiesty Fawn to Hardy Heron today. Five minutes into using it, I found my first oddity: the left channel was playing ten time louder than the right on my headphones. After a little bit of digging, playing around, and tweaking, I discovered that if you open up KMix, Right Click on the Output for the device you are using, and select split channels, the problem goes away.

Now that KAMP has successfully been set up on a Kubuntu box, setting up multiple sites on one server is the next logical step. This allows you to do Drupal testing in multiple versions/setups at the same time on one localhost server. To begin, open up Konsole (command line utility) and change to the Apache2 sites-available directory (this is where Apache stores the setup files for each Virtual Host):

cd /etc/apache2/sites-available/

Next, login as root and copy the existing default setup file and name it to the "server" you want to use:

Using your favorite text editor, modify the newly copied file so that it points to the correct files (using VI in this example):

vi exampleSite

Modify/Add the following lines:

NameVirtualHost * to NameVirtualHost exampleSite:80
<VirtualHost *> to <VirtualHost exampleSite:80>
Add ServerName exampleSite
DocumentRoot /var/www/ to DocumentRoot /var/www/exampleSite/

I can't tell you how many times having a Subversion (SVN) repository has saved my butt with clients in the past. Most recently, one of my clients had inadvertently deleted their entire site and did not have any backups to restore it. Dun-Dun-Dah! SVN to the rescue!

However, when restoring the files, it became increasingly frustrating how many times I was asked for my password when browsing the file directories in KDESVN (Hey! Back off! I like using a GUI tool to browse my SVN repos and will eventually learn the command line syntax). So, after I "fixed" somebody else's mistake, I turned my attention to setting up a RSA private key/public key cryptographic pair to be able to access my SVN repository securely, and without being repeatedly asked for my password. Here are the steps I followed:

Lullabot developer Addi Berry put together some great screencasts on how to setup local Drupal test environments on Windows, Mac, and Ubuntu. Even though I have been running Kubuntu as my primary OS at home for over a month now, I hadn't actually set up my test server yet! To make sure I didn't make a misstep, I used Addi's video as the basis for the setup I did on my machine, but command lineified it a bit:

1. Open Konsole
2. Login as root
   • sudo -s
3. Make sure that the repository is up to date
   • apt-get update
4. Install Apache, MySQL, PHP5, the PHP5 GD Library, and the PHP5 MySQL configuration
   • apt-get install apache2 mysql-client mysql-server php5 php5-gd php5-mysql
5. Enable Clean URLs in the conf file
   • vi /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/000-default
   • press i to go into insert mode
   • Change AllowOverride None to AllowOverride All in the <Directory /var/www/> section
   • press esc