First wean them off of IE

One caveat: About a year ago I banned the use of Internet Explorer in the office and made it hard to find all our computers. So everybody already knew that the little orange and blue firefox logo means “internet”, as opposed to the little e.

The moral

The moral of this story is that the average user does not give a crap about what operating system they use as long as they can do the stuff they want without thinking much.

Ubuntu is Important

You know, along with Ubuntu, I use Windows XP, Windows Vista, and Mac OSX every day. But if I had a choice, I would use Ubuntu for just about everything. Windows completely sucks and seems to get worse with every version. Vista is just embarrassing. I use OSX for managing my photographs and for entertainment purposes because all the media stuff works flawlessly. But if I’m doing anything important, Ubuntu is my go-to. Its faster, has better workflow, and every open source tool I can think of is a one-click install away. Plus it looks awesome makes me feel hardcore.

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/ApacheMySQLPHP

In the teminal:

• $ sudo tasksel install lamp-server
• $ sudo apt-get install phpmyadmin
• $ sudo gedit /etc/apache2/apache2.conf
  • Add the following to the end of this file:  “Include /etc/phpmyadmin/apache.conf”
• Edit the /etc/php5/apache2/php.ini file and increase the memory_limit value. I used 64M, but that may be overkill.

First open ~/.barshrc in a text editor and uncomment lines 73 through 75 so they look like this:

if [ -f ~/.bash_aliases ]; then
. ~/.bash_aliases
fi

Then create a file called .bash_aliases in your home directory (if it doesn’t already exist). Edit that file like so:

alias themename="cd ~/public_html/websitename/wp-content/themes/themename/"


Restart terminal (or source .bashrc with $ source ~/.bashrc, or even terser $. .bashrc), type in themename and press enter. Voila! Your are cd’ed all the way into that deeply nested file without having to type the whole thing. This works great for lots of other common commands that are a little too verbose:

alias ins="sudo apt-get install"


Once those lines are added to your .bash_aliases file and you restart terminal, you will be able to install new packages like so:

ins packagename

Handy eh? (That last suggestion is courtesy of the always useful Lifehacker)

Update, 3/29/10

I just had to do this from scratch after a computer disaster, and I found an omission. Before you get started on this business you need to do what this post says:

http://www.likesalmondesign.com/use-your-users-public_html-directory-to-serve-webpages/

And we’re off

Now on to virtual hosts. The first thing you need to do is edit /etc/hosts so your computer knows where to look for your website:

1. In the terminal, enter: $ sudo gedit /etc/hosts
2. In gedit, add the following line to the hosts file: 127.0.0.1 mysite.dev
   • Note: you can use whatever name you want for your virtual hosted site. I like to use the suffix .dev because it won’t conflict with sites on the actual internet.
   • Note: 127.0.0.1 is the same ip address that is assigned to localhost in that file. If yours is different, use that one.

Next add your site to /etc/apache2/sites-available/ and then link to that file in /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/:

1. In the terminal, cd to /etc/apache2/sites-available/
2. Create a new file with: $ sudo touch mysite.dev
3. Open that file in gedit: $ sudo gedit mysite.dev
4. Add following to that file:
   <VirtualHost *:80>
   ServerName mysite.dev
   ServerAlias mysite.dev
   ServerAdmin myaddress@email.com
   DocumentRoot /home/yourusername/public_html/mysite/
   </VirtualHost>

Add a pseudo link to that file in /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/:

1. cd over to /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/
2. In the terminal, enter: $ sudo ln -s /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/mysite.dev mysite.dev
   • Note: $ ln -s target linkname

Finally, restart Apache:

1. $ sudo service apache2 restart
2. You’re done!

See! Not so bad…

• $ sudo apt-get install apache2
• $ sudo apt-get install php5 libapache2-mod-php5 php5-mysql
• $ sudo apt-get install mysql-server
• $ sudo apt-get install phpmyadmin

Just agree when it asks you stuff.


$ sudo service apache2 start
$ sudo service apache2 stop
$ sudo service apache2 restart


To install VirtualBox, I got a lot of help from hopla on the Ubuntu Forum. I quote:

You need: virtualbox, qemu, wine

Code:

apt-get install virtualbox qemu wine

Download the free(!) Microsoft Internet Explorer Application Compatibility Check VPC Images here.

(Note: you don’t have to download the full pack, you can cherry pick specific combinations of XP/Vista and IE6-8)

Extract the VPC image(s) with wine (double-click).
(Note: it might take a while before the first window shows up)

Turn the VPC image(s) into (a) VMWare image(s) (which is/are readable by VirtualBox):

qemu-img convert -f vpc image.vhd -O vmdk image.vmdk

Setup a new VM in VirtualBox, using the vmdk image as an existing disk. Boot it, you will see the Windows boot progress bar and … it will BSOD shortly after.

Fixing the BSOD:

The BSOD is caused because the virtual Windows tries to load processor drivers for the wrong processor (it is not running on VirtualPC proc, but on VirtualBox proc). Or something like that…
We need to force Windows not to attempt to load drivers for the processor (it doesn’t need any proc drivers, because it’s all virtual anyway).
Start safe mode by (frantically) hitting F8 at Windows boot and choosing safe mode.

Ignore all the ‘New hardware’ detected warnings (we will deal with those later). Start a command box and run the following command to disable the loading of processor drivers:

Code:

sc config processor start= disabled

(note the space between ‘=’ and ‘disabled’!)

Restart the virtual Windows, it should now boot all the way to the Windows Desktop.

Once your virtual Windows has rebooted, go to Devices -> Install Guest Additions in the VirtualBox window.  This will mount a (virtual) CD with the Guest Additions software.  The autorun feature didn’t work every time, so if a new window doesn’t open up, find the Guest Additions CD in Windows Explorer and run the .exe.  This adds a lot of functionality to your virtual machine.

After rebooting the virtual machine, I followed the instructions from Primeval Soup:

In Windows, go to:

Start > Run > “cmd”

In the terminal, type:

D:\VBoxWindowsAdditions-x86.exe /extract /D=C:\Drivers

Start > Administrative Tools > Computer Management

Select Device Manager.

Select Batteries, Unknown Device -> Disable

Select Sound, video and game controllers, Multimedia Audio Controller -> Disable

Select Universal Serial Bus controllers, Universal Serial Bus (USB) Controller -> Disable

Select Network Adapters, Ethernet Controller -> Update Driver

Select Yes, now and every time, click Next

Select Install from a list or specific location, click Next

Enter location “C:\Drivers\x86\Network\AMD”

Click Finish

Open a browser, test connection

You’re done!

And that is a good feeling.

change directory: cd

change local directory: lcd

list directory contents: ls

list local directory contents: !ls

print local working directory: lpwd

Put a file: put filename

Put multiple files: mput filename1 filename2

Get a file: get filename

Get multiple files: mget filename1 filename2

To login to a host with sftp:

lftp -u username sftp://username.server.com

To get a folder including all subfolders:

mirror filename

To put a whole folder and all its contents, without mirroring file permissions:

mirror -R -p filename

1. Edit the xorg.conf file by typing the following into the terminal: sudo gedit /etc/X11/xorg.conf
2. Edit that file to look like this:

   Section "Monitor"
       Identifier    "Configured Monitor"
   EndSection
   
   Section "Screen"
       Identifier    "Default Screen"
       Monitor        "Configured Monitor"
       Device        "Configured Video Device"
       SubSection "Display"
           Virtual    2048 2048
       EndSubSection
   EndSection
   
   Section "Device"
       Identifier    "Configured Video Device"
           Driver          "intel"
   EndSection

3. Log out and log back in again.
4. Open display preferences (System -> Preferences -> Display) and click on the rectangle that represents your external monitor. The Resolution pull down menu should now list the correct resolution.

And while you’re at it, you might as well turn off the screen on your laptop, since you’re not using it anyway.