Instead of using the stable release of Debian they are using the testing branch (Squeeze) and it will be a rolling release like Sidux.

Now, I was not too fond of Sidux because it had some problems with setting up a LAMP stack (and they highly discouraged users to do so as well), but I’m very curious to see how this new LMDE will turn out!

Find the official announcement here including download links and more information.

I will download it at home and check it out in VirtualBox sometime… So far it’s only a LiveDVD for i386 so I won’t be switching to it anytime soon at home, since all my machines have 4GB RAM.

I’ve been working on a little gallery in Zend Framework, and am generating thumbnails in a cache dir.
They were pretty damn small already, but I like to keep tweaking at things so this was a nice little extra.

In Ubuntu you can install it quickly using:

Then in my PHP code I just used this:

You might want to be aware of the fact that since I am writing the thumbnails to disk as apache and then running jpegoptim on the file from php the permissions are already set correctly. Otherwise you might have to check the owner of the file, when testing from command-line in Ubuntu I had to use sudo to run it against the thumbnails since they were owned by www-data (the default apache user in Ubuntu).

Just a note of warning: this is meant for Ubuntu Lucid (Gnome) in combination with Linux Mint 9!

So here’s how you can install the Linux Mint menu by adding the Mint repo, and thus keeping up to date

First we want to add the Mint repo by creating a new file in /etc/apt/sources.list.d/ called mint.list:

Paste in the following line:

Press Ctrl+X to close Nano and save the file.
Install the GPG key for the repo:

Next run aptitude update, and install some Mint packages:

Now just add the Mint Menu to the Gnome panel:

Click to view larger image

To tweak it a bit more follow this (blatantly copied from this Ubuntu Forums post):

Ubuntuize it
If you right-click on the menu button and select “Preferences” you will see the menu with a whole bunch of stuff. On the first tab which is shown, named “Main Button” you can change how the button looks in the gnome pane. For me, I deleted the button text as I just wanted to have a logo, but of course the choice is yours.

As for the icon, if you want an ubuntu logo, here are the paths to copy in (NOTE: paths are based of Ubuntu 10.04)

If you’re using a light theme:

/usr/share/icons/ubuntu-mono-light/apps/24/start-here.svg

If you’re using a dark theme:

/usr/share/icons/ubuntu-mono-dark/apps/24/start-here.svg

Play around!
Have a good look around the preferences and what you can do. There is quite a lot you can play with.
You can choose what items you have in the “Favourites” section but right clicking on a menu item (from “All Applications”) and choose “Show in my favourites”. You can remove items from your favourites by right clicking on them and selected “Remove from favourites”.

Known Issue…
After you ave added it to the panel, you will notice that if you select “All Applications”, that there is nothing there, or that there are no sub-menus. No problem, all should be fine and working after a the next reboot.

So there you have it, the Mint Menu in Ubuntu. And remember, Mint is made off Ubuntu so everything is pretty much interchangeable, so don’t worry that you’re using a menu made for a different
distro.

Now to make an autostart script you can actually just reuse the one that comes with TS3: ts3server_startscript.sh

The only thing I did to get this working was edit ts3server_startscript.sh and change one line.

I replaced with the actual path:

Then I went into /etc/init.d and made a symlink to this file, like so:

Then we need to make sure the TS3 server starts on a reboot, so we at it to the various runlevels like so:

Now you can start/stop/restart TS3 like any other service:

TS3 will run as root though, which is a bit of a vulnerability, maybe I’ll figure out how to fix that later.
I used another very simple start script before, but because it lacked start/stop/restart commands the server couldn’t actually reboot..
It would send the stop command to the service, which would just hang there and the server wouldn’t proceed to shut down processes after that.
The way I described above works perfectly for me

Now to experiment with the 2.6.35 kernel, no idea if that will run on a VPS but we’ll see soon enough

However, with the increasingly weird model numbers these days from companies like Gigabyte and Asus I can’t seem to remember them anymore.
I also have way too many computers to take care of to remember my own now (am I getting old?).

Anyway’s, here’s the command. The data we are interrested in should be at the top of the output. I like to “pipe” it to the “less” command so we can scroll through it easily:

Hope this helps someone

For more information than I can give to you in a sane manner check out this page:
http://kernelnewbies.org/Linux_2_6_35

A list of things that have changed:

1. Transparent spreading of incoming network traffic load across CPUs
2. Btrfs improvements
3. XFS Delayed logging
4. KDB kernel debugger frontend
5. perf improvements
6. Graphic improvements
7. Memory compaction
8. Support for multiple multicast route tables
9. L2TP Version 3 (RFC 3931) support
10. CAIF Protocol support
11. ACPI Platform Error Interface support

I found an Ubuntu PPA where you can find this new kernel:
https://launchpad.net/~kernel-ppa/+archive/ppa

Please note I take no responsibility for anything that happens to you, your computer or your ballsack from installing the kernel from this PPA!!!
I will have a test later on tonight on my laptop which is not of importance to me, maybe I’ll give an update after that (if my laptop or ballsack hasn’t exploded).

UPDATE: The PPA seems to install a server version of the kernel. After having installed it X didn’t start anymore, so be warned. I might have gotten it to boot back into X with some time, but I had too much to do.. Days are short lately.

UPDATE2: Phoronix (I love these guys, benchmarking galore!) have run benchmarks using the .35 kernel on an Core i7 machine. Check the results here.

UPDATE3: The xorg-edgers ppa has the new .35 kernel in the repo, I dist-upgraded my homeserver with this PPA (yes I know, quite risky!!) and so far it seems stable. I will need to do a bit more testing to see if everything stays stable.

First I run a sudo dpkg -l |grep mysql and sudo aptitude purge ALL packages that get listed.
Note this could remove your databases too, but you should have a backup somewhere to start with

Sometimes you will probably also have to remove things like phpmyadmin and some php/apache modules as well.
Once that is done, run sudo tasksel and install the LAMP package.

For me this has reinstalled mysql (and actually saved old databases) and let me continue with what I was doing.

In creating Ubuntu Linux, Canonical has focused on ease of use, and this extends to the install procedure. To this end, Ubuntu eschewed many of the detailed questions that had discouraged potential Linux users of an earlier era. However, despite relative improvements in that area, the installation is still peppered with questions. This means that an admin tasked with the deployment of more than three or four computers is doomed to spend an entire morning dashing around, typing in responses to the same questions over and over again.

Fortunately, there is a solution in the form of unattended installs. An admin can alter a standard Linux distribution so that it no longer asks the user questions while installing. Obviously, the installer will need the information that it normally acquires by prompting the user for details, and the trick is to provide this information in advance in the form of what is called an ‘answer file’. It’s possible to divide automated installs into two main categories: customised CD-ROM and network installation. Both approaches have their relative strengths and weaknesses.

Find the rest of the article here.

Solution: remove the wine-ppa from /etc/apt/sources.list.d/ and reinstall the original wine1.2 from the Ubuntu repo.

Just thought this might help some other people, and of course as a mental note to myself

UPDATE: Turns out it wasn’t Wine1.2RC5 after all! I had changed my max half-open connections in uTorrent before I updated Wine and it seems Lucid doesn’t like the setting I put in. I reverted back to the default setting 0f 8 and reinstalled the new Wine and everything is still working.

UPDATE2: After a while uTorrent starting crashing my system again. Out of desperation I reinstalled my whole system to a fresh install of Ubuntu Lucid x64. I added the wine developers ppa since wine 1.2 had gone stable and after installing wine and utorrent it started crashing again after about 30 seconds. I think I fixed it now though: I removed the wine ppa from /etc/apt/sources.list.d/, ran an aptitude update, aptitude purge wine1.2 and then aptitude install wine. This seems to have grabbed wine1.2 as well though, although aptitude show wine shows it should be some lower version. I then ran winecfg and set it to Windows 2000 compatibility, and now uTorrent seems stable!  It’s been a very long struggle, but I just can’t live without it.. None of the other clients “feel right” to me or lack features I really want to have (labels). qBittorrent would be my second choice, but it does some weird things with temp directories and started writing incomplete downloads to my complete folder.

UPDATE 3: My machine is still crashing sporadically.. And I have no idea why, but there seems to be quite a thread on the ubuntuforums about people with the same problem, although there doesn’t seem to be any relation between the various posts. The only thing they have in common is that they are running Lucid. Some report having fixed the problem by running KDE instead of Gnome (the horror). Maybe I’ll give XFCE a try..