Fixing phpMyAdmin

One common error that some people make is that they forget to mark apache2 during the phpMyAdmin configuration. When this happens you'll get a 404 Not Found error when trying to navigate to http://localhost/phpmyadmin/.

Click to enlarge

If this happens, enter the following terminal command.

You will be prompted about reinstalling the database. Accept the default of "No" and hit <Enter>.

Click to enlarge

Make sure to then mark apache2 by having the cursor next to apache2 and then hitting <Space> to mark it with a *, then hit <Enter>.

You will then need to reload Apache.

You should now be able to load http://localhost/phpmyadmin/. If you're still seeing the 404 Not Found error, then you will need to clear your web browser cache and try again.

Click to enlarge

Fixing the Apache fully qualified domain name

During the above steps you may have seen an error message like this when reloading Apache.

apache2: Could not reliably determine the server's fully qualified domain name,
using 127.0.1.1 for ServerName

This doesn't seem to cause any problems for me, but if you don't like seeing that error, you can fix it with this command.

Then reload Apache with

Remove LAMP?

Is your LAMP setup a mess and you just want to start over? Follow these instructions to Remove LAMP from Ubuntu.

Follow these step by step instructions to install and configure LAMP  on Ubuntu 12.04. This process has been tested and also works on Linux Mint 13. If you have a reasonably fast broadband connection, you should be done in less than half an hour.

Install LAMP on Ubuntu

The developers at Ubuntu have made it really easy to install and configure the packages for LAMP with a single terminal command. So open up a terminal window and let's get started.

Yes, you read that right. Don't leave out the caret (^) at the end. The command won't work without it. It's magical!

sudo apt-get install lamp-server^

The apt package manager will now show the packages to be installed and ask for confirmation. Hit <Enter> to confirm and continue with the install.

Install LAMP packages

After some time downloading packages, you will be prompted to set a password for the root user for MySQL.

Set MySQL root password

Enter the password you want to use for MySQL. Do not leave it blank. You'll be prompted a second time to confirm your password.

Confirm MySQL root password

After confirming your password, apt will continue installing the remaining packages.

Remaining LAMP package installation

Your LAMP installation is now complete. Wow, that was easy! Now there's just a few more steps to get things configured to make it easy to work with your system.

Test Apache

Open a web browser window and enter the address http://localhost/. You should see a web page that says "It Works!"

Apache works

Test php

Now that you've confirmed that the Apache web server works, you want to make sure that your php installation is working. To do that you need to create a file in /var/www called testing.php. You can use your favorite text editor as root, or you can use the following terminal command:

Go back to your web browser and enter the address http://localhost/testing.php/ and you should see a page displaying information about your php installation.

php information

Fix Apache fully qualified domain name

You may have noticed an error message from Apache about the server's fully qualified domain name.

apache2: Could not reliably determine the server's fully qualified domain name, using 127.0.1.1 for ServerName

This is not a big deal, but if it bothers you, you can fix it with the following commands.

Now reload the Apache web server.

You should no longer see the error message.

Configure MySQL

Since this tutorial is for setting up a local web development environment, the MySQL needs to be bound to the localhost IP address. By default this should be 127.0.0.1 on your system. Just in case, you can verify it with these commands.

You should see something like
127.0.0.1 localhost
::1     ip6-localhost ip6-loopback

You now  want to verify that you have the correct bind address in MySQL's my.cnf file.

You should see:
bind-address = 127.0.0.1

If the bind address doesn't match the one set for localhost on your system, you'll need to edit /etc/mysql/my.cnf as root to correct it.

List of Ubuntu 12.04 torrent downloads

Here are some links to the torrent files at the Ubuntu Mirror at Oregon State University (USA).

• Ubuntu 12.04 Desktop x86 torrent
• Ubuntu 12.04 Desktop 64 Bit torrent
• Ubuntu 12.04 Alternate x86 torrent
• Ubuntu 12.04 Alternate 64 Bit torrent
• Ubuntu 12.04 Server x86 torrent
• Ubuntu 12.04 Server 64 Bit torrent

List of Ubuntu download mirrors

If you prefer to do just a direct download, you can try one of the many mirrors. As of this writing, not all of the mirrors have been fully updated though. Some are still showing the Beta2 release.

Here is the full list of Ubuntu download mirrors.

For your convenience, here is a list of download mirrors that have a download bandwidth of 10 Gbps or greater.

• Globo.com - Brazil
• C3SL/UFPR - Brazil
• LaPS/UFPA - Brazil
• Nexcom Inc. - Canada
• University of Calgary - Canada
• GRENA - Georgia
• RWTH Aachen University - Germany
• Technische Universitat Dresden - Germany
• idREPO - Indonesia
• University of Twente - The Netherlands
• Umea University - Sweden
• SWITCH - Switzerland
• Argonne National Laboratory - USA
• Pacific Northwest National Lab - USA

Happy downloading. My torrent download is already done!

When viewed on the web, the code used to display the photo on a web page can be written to read this information and display it properly on the page. The problem arises when you just want to use the browsers native ability to view an image by itself. Most web browsers don't provide this function and will just display the image in landscape mode.

An example of this can be seen when receiving a photo attachment in Gmail. The image will be shown in its proper orientation in the image preview as can be seen in the screen capture below.

When you click on "view" to see the image at a larger scale, you get something like this.

How to fix the image rotation in Chrome or Chromium

Thankfully, someone has written a nice little plug-in for Chrome that will cause the stand alone image to display in the properly rotated orientation based on the EXIF data. From within the Chrome or Chromium browser, go to the Chrome Web Store. Enter "exif rotate" into the search box.

Find a plug-in called EXIF Image Orientation and click on "ADD TO CHROME". Click on "Add" at the confirmation pop-up. The plug-in should now be installed.

Go back to your email with the attached image and click on "view" again. At first it will come up in landscape mode like before, but as soon as it's completely done loading, it will switch to portrait mode as seen below.

You are now free to enjoy your email photo attachments.

Do you know where this photo was taken? Hint: it's somewhere in the USA.

The joint venture company will be called Micronical and will be charged with developing a new open source user interface that will merge the best features of the new Windows Metro interface with the best from Ubuntu's Unity interface. Although no official announcement has been made, word has it that the new UI will be called iMeUnity (pronounced immunity) and will be a common interface for desktop computers, mobile phones, tablets, and smart TV's.

Since the joint venture is only for user interface development, each company will release its own products with the new interface. Microsoft will continue to use their proprietary OS kernel with iMeUnity on top. It is expected that this will debut with the release of Windows 9. Ubuntu will continue to use the Linux kernel and the GNU user land tools in combination with iMeUnity. Ubuntu will debut the new interface in the future LTS release, Ubuntu 14.04. Recognizing that this further evolution of UI will likely confound and slow down Ubuntu's users, this version will be code named Tortuous Terrapin according to a post on Mark Shuttleworth's blog.

There is no word yet how this might affect Ubuntu's derivative distributions, but it's sure to make things exciting for the developers. You can view the full video of the official announcement from Canonical and Microsoft  here. I don't know about you, but I can't wait to see what they come up with.

After installing Plex on my Ubuntu Lucid computer, I had an issue where I'd get a pop-up message when going to reboot or shutdown saying that the administrator password was required in order to shut down with multiple users logged in.  This is because the Plex Media Server installation creates a user called plex and the server is run under that ID. So the system saw that as another user logged in to the machine in  addition to me.

Well, thanks to a post on the Ubuntu Forums, I found a solution. You need to make a few edits to /usr/share/polkit-1/actions/org.freedesktop.consolekit.policy so that you can reboot or shut down with multiple users logged in.

You can replace vim in the above command with your favorite text editor (ie. gedit, kate, mousepad, etc). The edits I had to make are show in bold below.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE policyconfig PUBLIC
 "-//freedesktop//DTD PolicyKit Policy Configuration 1.0//EN"
 "http://www.freedesktop.org/standards/PolicyKit/1.0/policyconfig.dtd">

<!--
Policy definitions for ConsoleKit
-->

<policyconfig>

  <action id="org.freedesktop.consolekit.system.stop">
    <description>Stop the system</description>
    <message>System policy prevents stopping the system</message>
    <defaults>
      <allow_inactive>no</allow_inactive>
      <allow_active>yes</allow_active>
    </defaults>
  </action>

  <action id="org.freedesktop.consolekit.system.stop-multiple-users">
    <description>Stop the system when multiple users are logged in</description>
    <message>System policy prevents stopping the system when other users are logged in</message>
    <defaults>
      <allow_inactive>no</allow_inactive>
      <!--File edited to fix shutdown issue after installing Plex Media Server.-->
      <!-- <allow_active>auth_admin_keep</allow_active> -->
      <allow_active>yes</allow_active>
      <!--End Edit-->
    </defaults>
  </action>

  <action id="org.freedesktop.consolekit.system.restart">
    <description>Restart the system</description>
    <message>System policy prevents restarting the system</message>
    <defaults>
      <allow_inactive>no</allow_inactive>
      <allow_active>yes</allow_active>
    </defaults>
  </action>

  <action id="org.freedesktop.consolekit.system.restart-multiple-users">
    <description>Restart the system when multiple users are logged in</description>
    <message>System policy prevents restarting the system when other users are logged in</message>
    <defaults>
      <allow_inactive>no</allow_inactive>
      <!--File edited to fix reboot issue after installing Plex Media Server.-->
      <!-- <allow_active>auth_admin_keep</allow_active> -->
      <allow_active>yes</allow_active>
      <!--End Edit-->
    </defaults>
  </action>

</policyconfig>

I haven't had the above issue with a recent install of Kubuntu 11.10, but it does appear that it's affecting users of Ubuntu 11.10.

The author doesn't have comments enabled on his site, so I sent him an email. Here's a copy.

Igor,

Thanks for writing your piece, "Screw this, I'm going back to
Windows!" It echo's many of the same sentiments I've had recently, but
I haven't had the time or energy to write a piece such as yours. I've
recently been going through a new computer build with an Intel Sandy
Bridge processor and have yet to find a distro that fully meets my
needs.

I was happy with Ubuntu Lucid on my old 32 bit machine, but I've found
the 64 bit version to be buggy and not take full advantage of my new
processor. I tried Ubuntu 11.10, but can't get used to Unity; not so
good on a 22 inch monitor. Using Gnome fallback is OK, but it's
obvious that there's been little or no work to integrate the system to
be used in this mode.

I'm now on Kubuntu 11.10 and it's been a rocky start. I've run into
issues with my hardware that I didn't have with Ubuntu 11.10. WTF? I
don't know, maybe I'll give Xubuntu or Open SUSE a try, but I'm really
just getting tired of screwing around and just want something that
works. This is the first time in years that I've seriously considered
buying a copy of Windows.

Thanks again for saying what needed to be said.

Sincerely,
Linerd

To install vbrfix in Ubuntu, first make sure that the universe repository is enabled in your software sources. Then you can install it through one of the graphical package managers, or from the command line with:

vbrfix is a command line tool. To use it, open a terminal window and navigate to the directory containing the files that you want to fix. Then, issue the command:

Where in-file.mp3 is the file to be fixed and out-file.mp3 is the fixed version of that file. You can also allow it to overwrite the old file with the newer, fixed version. Simply use the same file name for output as you use for input.

Now, if you would like to fix and overwrite all of the MP3 files in your working directory, you can use a loop like this. Note: this assumes your file extensions are all in lower case (.mp3).

I've never had a problem with vbrfix, but you might consider first copying your files to another directory make sure you don't screw up your original files.

To avoid needing a tool like this in the future, make sure to use an encoder that writes the Xing header. Gstreamer can do this if you include xingmux in the pipeline. Here's a script I wrote to batch convert audio files to MP3 using Gstreamer.

The output can be adjusted with command line switches to show only the current time. The time will be output in the format of the system locale by using the +%r switch, so the command will look like this:

Which gives the following output on my system:

So now that I can display the current time, I just need to figure out how to continuously update the information in order to create a terminal clock. I'm going to do that by using the echo command to display the output of the date command. By using some options with echo so that the output gets over-written, and placing that command in an infinite loop, I can display a simple clock in the terminal.

So here's the command:

Take note of the back-ticks around the date command. That tells the echo command to display the results of the date command. The "\\b" enters a backspace into the command and "\\c" tells echo not to enter a newline character. The number of \\b's needed will depend on the output time display format for your locale, so adjust this up or down as needed.

All in all, it's not that useful as most GUI based systems have a clock build in, but it provides a nice example of using an infinite loop as well as some of the special options available with the echo and date commands.

I've done a few different posts about re-encoding audio files. In my earliest one I showed how to re-sample a folder of MP3s to a lower bitrate using LAME. That process had the issue of losing the ID3 tags and required an ugly work around to partially solve the issue. I then some other posts showing how to convert a few different audio formats using GStreamer, but the process was neither generic or automated. GStreamer, however, does a great job of retaining  ID3 tags and other types of metadata, so it seemed like a good place to start with a new script.

GStreamer also has a great plugin that can determine what type of audio file is being input, so it can be used to make a fairly generic script that can handle most audio file types as input. The following script will convert all audio files in a folder to MP3 format. It will even re-encode/re-sample MP3's to the desired quality level. I've chosen to use variable bitrate encoding, but the GStreamer pipeline could be easily altered to do constant bitrate instead. You can increase or decrease the average bitrate of the output by adjusting the quality parameter in the pipeline.

#!/bin/bash

######################################################################
#                                                                    #
# NAME:            conv2mp3                                          #
# AUTHOR:          Linerd (http://tuxtweaks.com)                     #
# LICENSE:         CC BY 3.0                                         #
#                  http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/       #
# REQUIRES:        GStreamer, GStreamer plugins (good, bad, ugly),   #
#                  lame                                              #
# VERSION:         1.0                                               #
# DESCRIPTION:     A program to re-encode audio to MP3 using         #
#                  GStreamer. This script will convert all audio     #
#                  files in a directory to MP3 format. The new files #
#                  will be placed in a sub-directory of the same     #
#                  name.                                             #
#                                                                    #
######################################################################

# Create a directory for the MP3 files
FILEDIR=${PWD##*/}
OUTDIR="$FILEDIR"

echo "Directory is: $FILEDIR"

# Check if conversion/resample directory exists and create it if it doesn't.
shopt -s nocasematch   # Make text evaluation case insensitive
if
   test -e $OUTDIR
then
   echo -e  "File/directory \e[4m$OUTDIR\e[0m already exists. Files may be overwritten - continue? (Y/n)"
   read REPLY
   if
     [[ "$REPLY" = "n" ]]
   then
     exit 1
   fi
else
   mkdir -p "$OUTDIR"
fi
shopt -u nocasematch  # Make text evaluation case sensitive again

# Set newline as the field separator
IFS=$'\n'

for FILE in `file * | grep udio | cut -d: -f1 | sed 's: :\\ :g'`; do
  echo "File name is: $FILE"
  NAME=${FILE%.*}  #Get file basename
  echo "Basename is: $NAME"
  EXT=${FILE##*.}  #Get file extension
  echo "Extension is: $EXT"
  echo
  echo "New file is $OUTDIR/$NAME.mp3"
  # GStreamer pipeline - use VBR quality setting. Range allowed 0-10 with
  # 0 being the best quality.
  gst-launch filesrc location="$FILE" ! decodebin2 ! audioconvert ! lamemp3enc target=quality quality=3 ! xingmux ! id3v2mux ! filesink location="./$OUTDIR/$NAME".mp3
done

exit 0

Save the above script as a file called conv2mp3 somewhere in your executable path. I suggest /home/yourID/bin. Then you need to make the file executable. You can probably do that with your file manager, or you can do it through the terminal like this:

Now you are ready to run the script. Using a terminal, navigate to the directory with the files that you want to convert. Then, just enter the command:

The script will then convert the files to MP3 and place them in a subdirectory with the same name as the one containing your original files. Here's a screen shot of my directory before running conv2mp3.

Here's what the same directory looks like after running conv2mp3.

And here's the subdirectory containing the new MP3 files.