Sheeped

Greg Kroah-Hartman, a Linux kernel developer and author of the book Linux Kernel in a Nutshell made a huge announcement on his blog not too long ago.

Apparently, the Linux kernel development community (1500+) will develop kernel drivers for companies for free. I repeat: Kernel drivers. Since the Linux kernel is (roughly) the same in all distributions, this means that hardware support will be global.

This is big — No. This is epic, as described on Slashdot. If this actually works, the single biggest problem of Linux (hardware incompatability) will be progressively eliminated and Linux will become much more prominent, for sure.

Yes, that’s right, the Linux kernel community is offering all companies free Linux driver development. No longer do you have to suffer through all of the different examples in the Linux Device Driver Kit, or pick through the thousands of example drivers in the Linux kernel source tree trying to determine which one is the closest to what you need to do.

This driver will then be automatically included in all Linux distributions, including the “enterprise” ones.

This offer is in affect for all different types of devices, from USB toys to PCI video devices to high-speed networking cards. If you build it, we can get Linux drivers working for it.

I think I’m getting goosebumps.

Check out the whole article on Greg’s website.

This is my first large how-to. It’s a step-by-step guide through the entire installation and configuration of Ubuntu Linux 6.06 LTS LAMP Server. The how-to has over 32 screenshots and descriptions for each one, allowing anyone to set up their own Linux server with ease.

The how to currently consists of 4 parts:

Part 1: Preparing For Installation
Deals with downloading and burning the ISO image needed to install Linux.

Part 2: Boot-Up and Configuration
Deals with the beginning of the installation and initial configuration of regional settings and networking.

Part 3: Partitioning Your Drives
Deals with partitioning.

Part 4: Completing the Installation
Deals with the final configuration of user/password and LAMP settings, as well as tests if the server works.

Extra 1: Installation Video
Unedited screencast (4.10 mb AVI) of the installation process, starting from Part 2. 19min 32sec total, feel free to skip past the long wait in the middle. Use this as a reference, if anything, not a guide.

It is my intention to make additions and/or other how to’s complementing this one, so look out for more guides on playing with the Ubuntu Server and Linux in general.

This is part 4 in a series of 4:

- Overview
- Part 1: Preparing For Installation
- Part 2: Boot-Up and Configuration
- Part 3: Partitioning Your Drives
- Part 4: Completing the Installation
- Extra 1: Installation Video

Part 4: Completing the Installation

Now that you’re done partitioning, it’s time to complete the installation!

Setting Up the Timezone

- The installer will ask you what timezone you’re in. Select the one that best fits you and continue. I’ll choose Eastern. If you are prompted to use UTC, hit Yes (unless you have a reason not to).

Users and Passwords

- The first dialog after having entered the timezone asks you for your real name, not the alias you want to log in with.



- Now I’m asked for my desired username. The username should start with a lower-case letter, which can be followed by any combination of numbers and letters. The installer suggests patrick. I’ll go with that.


- Enter the password you’d like to associate with your account. This password will also be the password you use to perform actions that require ‘root’ access. In the next window, confirm the password by typing it again.


Sit back and relax as the installer completes installing Ubuntu Server on your computer. Let the installation process finish, eject the CD, and reboot your system. Congratulations, installation is done!



Linux should now initialize and prompt you for your username and password. If your screen looks something like this, all went well. Feel free to log in.

Setting up LAMP

Wouldn’t it be great if our LAMP server just worked now, without us having to do anything? Well, it does! Try browsing to your servers IP in a browser, in my case http://192.168.0.6. Woot!


It’s time to do a few changes to our LAMP server. Normally, this would be a 3/4-hour process of manually editing config files and testing. Thanks to Ubuntu though, the installer does it all — better too. All we need to do is choose how we want our LAMP server to work.

By default, Apache2 uses /var/www/ as its document root. We’ll want to change this to our home folder in order to reap the space we’ve allocated.

- Log in, in case you haven’t. Type the exact command mkdir www - This will create the folder /home/patrick/www/ which we will be using as the document root of our server.

- Type the exact command: sudo nano -w /etc/apache2/sites-available/default and hit Enter. You will be prompted for your password. Enter it, and a text editor with our site’s config file will open (see screenshot to the right).


- Feel free to set the administrator e-mail to your own. Now, go through the document and replace all occurrences of /var/www/ to /home/patrick/www/, where ‘patrick’ is the username you chose during the installation. Navigate around with the arrow buttons. When done, hit CTRL+X then type Y and Enter to save the changes.


- Time to restart Apache to apply the changes. Type sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart

- Now, let’s see if this really works! Assuming you’re in your home folder (type cd to make sure), type cd www followed by ls. You should see.. nothing. Good.

- Type nano -w index.php
We’ll create a sample PHP script to test if the server and PHP is working. <?php echo "It's working!" ?> will suffice. Again, hit CTRL + X followed by Y and Enter to save the contents.


- Navigate to your server, e.g. http://192.168.0.5 — it works!

You’re done! Your server is working perfectly!

If you’re uncomfortable with the command-line interface, I recommend you look into guides for installing Webmin and phpMyAdmin for Ubuntu. Also, if you would like to administer your server from your own computer, you can install SSH with the command: sudo apt-get install ssh
You can access it with applications like PuTTY.

In order to install phpMyAdmin (and more) with sudo apt-get install, you will first need to enable the Universe repository. There’s a nice guide on how to do that from the CLI here.

If something went wrong, feel free to ask for guidance in a comment to this article. The Ubuntu Forums has hands-down the best support community you will ever find. If you have any questions or problems, I highly recommend them as well.

Look out for more how to’s on how to use your server for great things.

This is part 3 in a series of 4:

- Overview
- Part 1: Preparing For Installation
- Part 2: Boot-Up and Configuration
- Part 3: Partitioning Your Drives
- Part 4: Completing the Installation
- Extra 1: Installation Video

Part 3: Partitioning Your Drives

This is the single hardest part to guide anyone through, remotely. All system setups are different so it’s hard to tell you exactly how to set up your system. Whether or not you’re going to be using LVM, how many partitions to make, etc.

- The standard options are pretty straight-forward, and I recommend you choose one of them if this process scares the living hell out of you. If you do choose one of them, feel free to skip to Part 4: Completing the Installation.


For the rest of this section, I will show you how I set up my system by manual partitioning. Please take my setup loosely — if there’s something that doesn’t fit you or something you’d prefer, adjust accordingly!

Manual Partitioning

- This is the manual partitioning menu. The first two options (if they are shown) will allow you to set up a software RAID and Logical Volume Management. These, if you need them, will have to wait until we have configured our partitions. I will not be configuring either, as they are both unique to each configuration and pretty straight-forward to set up.


- I have one harddrive, SCSI1 (0,0,0), a 268.4GB drive. To partition this drive, I’ll highlight it and hit Enter. A dialog will appear, asking me if I would like to create a new partition table, that will delete anything currently on the drive. I’ll hit Yes.


- This is the menu after deleting all partitions on the drive. Now I’m ready to set up new partitions.


- Select the “FREE SPACE” entry below the drive and hit Enter. You can choose to let the installer set up partitions automatically, or you can make them yourself. I’ll select Create a new partition.


- Our first partition will be the root ( ‘/’ ) partition. This is where all our system files and applications are stored. If you want, you can allocate a percentage of the drive to root, and leave the rest for the ‘/home’ partition. I’d recommend something inside the 15-25GB range for a root you’re going to be using for a long time. Seperating your root and /home is useful if you need to re-install Linux. I’ll assign 20GB to root.


- Unless you’re going to have more than 4 partitions per drive, select Primary here. Logical partitions are ‘fake’ partitions created to circumvent the normal limit of 4 partitions.



- Select Beginning. This tells the installer to position our root partition at the start of the available space.



- You can choose to leave everything as it is here. A little tweak: In Mount Options you can choose to turn ‘noatime’ on, which will give you a significant speed boost. It disables generating a new time stamp every time a file is accessed. When you’re happy, select Done setting up the partition and hit Enter.

Additional Partitions

Now that you know how to set up a new partition, do the following:

- Following the same instructions as before, create a partition in the free space with a size roughly equal to half of your RAM, e.g. 512mb if you have 1GB of RAM. Make it a Primary partition as before, in the Beginning of the free space as well. When you get to the confirmation dialog, highlight the file system type (Use as:) and hit Enter. Select swap area from the menu. Accept the changes. The swap area acts as a substitute if all available RAM is being used.

- Finally, create another partition, but /home rather than /. Ubuntu should automatically suggest this. Have this partition use the remaining space on your drive. Again, you can choose to enable ‘noatime’ to get a performance boost.

Verifying and Finalizing

Your partition table should now look like this (or be similar). If you’re missing the swap space or the /home partition, don’t worry. You can mess around as much as you want. If all goes wrong, delete the entire partition table by selecting the drive itself, and start over.


If you’re all done, hit Finish partitioning and write changes to disk. A confirmation dialog will appear, asking you if you’re sure you want to apply these changes. Double-check the settings and hit Yes if it looks right.

You’re all done with partitioning! Get ready for the fun stuff in

Part 4: Completing the Installation

If something went wrong, feel free to ask for guidance in a comment to this article.

This is part 2 in a series of 4:

- Overview
- Part 1: Preparing For Installation
- Part 2: Boot-Up and Configuration
- Part 3: Partitioning Your Drives
- Part 4: Completing the Installation
- Extra 1: Installation Video

Part 2: Boot-Up and Configuration

Now that you’ve downloaded and burnt the Ubuntu Server ISO image, you’re ready to begin the installation. Go ahead and reboot your server with the CD in. If your system does not automatically boot from the CD-ROM, you’ll need to enable this in your server’s BIOS configuration. This option and the method to access it varies from BIOS to BIOS, but generally you’ll be able to enter the BIOS by pressing either F2 or DEL when your computer is starting up. When you’ve reached the BIOS configuration menu (usually blue), look for any option that states “Boot from CD-ROM” or an option that allows you to configure the priority of each drive. Some BIOSes are set to boot from the harddrive before booting from the CD-ROM. Change it so CD-ROM is the first thing your server tries, then save the settings and reboot.

The screenshot to the right shows how my PhoenixBIOS is configured. The CD-ROM Drive is moved to the top, followed by Hard Drive and other network/removable devices.

Booting Up

Your server’s BIOS should now be set up correctly and should be booting from the CD-ROM drive. Hopefully you’re now seeing what is depicted in the screenshot to the right. Great! Now select Install a LAMP server and hit enter. You have begun the installation process.

Configuring Regional Settings

You’re not very far from having a full-fletched server now. Hang on!

- Now we’ll select the language of our system. Be warned that this is not just for the installation, it is the language your system will use after installation, as well. This is, of course, changeable, but just go with the right language from the get-go. I’ll choose English (it’d suck for you if I chose my native tongue, Danish). Hit Enter.


- Now, similarly, choose your location. The options vary depending on what language you chose in the previous step, so don’t be worried if you don’t see your country listed in the screenshot. If you select ‘other’ you will get a complete listing of languages. I’ll choose United States.


- The installer now asks for your keyboard type. The option displayed should be the correct one, so just hit Enter if it is. If not, try typing something or going through the list of keymaps.


The installer will now configure devices, load additional components, as well as load network hardware. In this How To, I’ll assume that you’re using either ADSL or DSL that does not require authentication. If you’re not, the installation will prompt you to enter the required information.

Configuring Networking

- The installer will now ask you what you want to call your server. Call it anything you want, this can be changed later. I will call mine patricks-server. This is not your username, it’s the servers hostname. It’s what identifies the server on the network.


And the installer detects more hardware…

Congratulations, you’re done with Part 2. Get ready for the hardest part, partitioning. Don’t worry, I’ll take good care of you.

Part 3: Partitioning Your Drives

If something went wrong, feel free to ask for guidance in a comment to this article.

Many of the people I know crinche when I tell them about setting up their own webserver. They think it’s terribly hard — and they’re right, to a certain extent. Until now, setting up a full-fletched LAMP server that actually works has been a task exclusively for the gifted. Well, no more. Regardless of your skill level, I will guide you through the entire installation process of Ubuntu 6.06 LTS Server, my favorite server distribution to date. It’s easy to use, it’s powerful, it’s secure, and it’s painless to configure.

The Ubuntu Server has no open ports after the installation and contains only the essential software needed to build a secure server.

Thanks to the Lightbox WordPress plugin, you can click on one of the screenshots below and scroll through them by clicking on the “Prev” “Next” links in the upper right and upper left corners of the screenshot window. Descriptions are provided below each screenshot, allowing you to see a slideshow, with commentary, of the entire installation process — without ever having to close the Lightbox window! You may miss out on some information by doing this, but you’ll certainly see the essentials.

Well, let’s begin!

Notice: The screenshots below may be obsolete, as the Ubuntu website has been redesigned. The other parts of this guide remain current.

Part 1: Preparing For Installation

Starting with the basics, we’ll find and download the appropriate ISO image for our system architecture. Then we’ll burn it and commence the installation process. If you’ve already downloaded and burnt the right ISO image, feel free to skip to Part 2: Boot-Up and Configuration. Be aware that “Ubuntu 6.06 LTS” is not the same as “Ubuntu 6.06 LTS Server”. They are two seperate images.

Getting the ISO Image

- First off, we’ll head over to Ubuntu.com and click the Server Download link.



- On the Download page, select Ubuntu 6.06 LTS, Ubuntu with long-term support.



- Now select the region closest to you. Which you choose is irrelevant (they’re mirrors, thus no difference in content). I’ll select United States.



- Click on the respective download link for your system architecture. If you’re not sure what to get, chances are PC (x86) is the right one. If you’re running a Mac (NOT the ones with an Intel chipset), get the Mac (PPC) image. If 64-bit, get the 64-bit one, and so on. Please verify that you’re downloading your image in the Server section, not the Desktop, before continuing.

Direct download links: PC (Intel x86), Mac (PowerPC), 64-bit PC (AMD64), SPARC.

Now grab a cup of coffee or a coke while you wait. You must.

Burning the ISO Image

Now that we’re done downloading the ISO image, we’ll use our favorite burning application to write the ISO to a CD-ROM. It is of utmost importance that you do not just copy the ISO file to a CD, but that you actually burn the image. Most writing applications have a feature called “Write Image”, “Write ISO to Disc”, “Burn ISO”, or similar. In Linux, the ‘k3b’ application (Nero equivalent) can do this with ease, so can Nautilus’ built-in CD writer (right-click the ISO in Gnome). Please see “How to Write ISO Files to CD in Windows” for Windows instructions, and “How do I burn an ISO image to CD in OS X? for Mac OS X instructions.

Get Ready to Install

When you’ve written the ISO image to a CD-ROM, please verify the contents of the disc. There should be several files and folders — if there’s only an .iso-file, you haven’t burnt the ISO. Please see the above instructions on how to burn it rather than copying.

If all looks fine, you’re done with Part 1! Let’s try it out in

Part 2: Boot-Up and Configuration

If something went wrong, feel free to ask for guidance in a comment to this article.

Ultimate Tag Warrior does not work with Wordpress 2.1 at the moment. The bug turns out to be quite nasty. Whenever a new comment is made, one is in moderation or a trackback is made, all the respective post’s tags will be deleted. This applies to both registered and anonymous users.

I’ve implemented a temporary fix that seems to work. I was able to find several other fixes, but none of them covered all of the errors I encountered. This is basically a mashup that should fix everything:

1. Get the newest version of Ultimate Tag Warrior.

2. In wp-content/plugins/UltimateTagWarrior/ultimate-tag-warrior-actions.php around line 500 in the ultimate_save_tags function, add the following if it is not already there:

if (isset($_POST['comment_post_ID'])) return $postID;
if (isset($_POST['not_spam'])) return $postID; // akismet fix
if (isset($_POST["comment"])) return $postID; // moderation.php fix
if (!isset($_POST['tagset'])) return $postID; // tag fix

Perhaps “wouldn’t function” is an overstatement — it’d surely function, just not quite as well. These are the WordPress plugins that I install before doing anything else on a new blog (all are highly recommended!):

404 Notifier
This is a nifty little plugin that allows you to subscribe to an RSS feed listing all of the 404 hits your site receives. It’s useful if you’re doing any changes in permalinks, deleting posts, or similar. I wouldn’t recommend this for high-traffic sites, unless you purposefully want to see what the “hacking” SQL-Inject scout bots look for.

Akismet
I can’t even begin to describe my undying love for this tool. I love it almost as much as I love Gmail’s anti-spam feature. It blocks spam comments on your blog, and it is almost always correct in what it blocks.

FeedBurner Feed Replacement
If you aren’t already “burning your feed”, you should. Feeds are becoming increasingly popular, and this service manipulates your feed to your choosing, e.g. by inserting a “Digg this” link below posts, tracking your feed subscribers/stats, and more. This plugin simply redirects all hits to /feed/ (and /comments/feed/ if you choose so) to your burnt feed on FeedBurner. For an example, see the Burned Sheeped Feed!

Google Analyticator
Google Analytics is wonderful. Again, I highly urge you to sign up for this service if you’re not already using it. This plugin automatically inserts the correct Analytics code into your pages - what makes it better than simply pasting the code in your template footer is it also generates Analytics code for outbound links, allowing you to keep track of what links are generating the most heat.

Google Sitemap Generator
I’ve previously tried to manually build sitemaps with the Google Sitemap Generator tool, by parsing Apache accesslogs. This turned out to be quite unsatisfying as it would index funky pages such as unfinished posts that I was working on in the admin panel. This sweet little plugin generates a Sitemap of all posts, pages and categorizes on your WordPress blog, prioritizes them based on comment count (if you choose to), automatically updates the sitemap and notifies Google every time you make a change, and more. If you’re using tags, it can also index that: Google Sitemap Generator UTW Tag Addon. For an example of a sitemap, see the Sheeped Sitemap (XML).

Related Entries
This plugin allows you to show a list of posts that are related to a specific post. For an example, check out the “Related Posts” part of the sidebar to the right.

Snap Preview Anywhere
Snap lets you show your users an automatic screenshot of a page before they click a link. For an example, hover over this link with your mouse: Hover me!. Snap is pretty cool, but serves no real, useful purpose — not on this site, anyway.

Sociable
Sociable automatically appends links to common social bookmarking sites for your users’ convenience. The links are set up so users will automatically get to an already existing story or submit a new one, preventing duplicate stories. For an example, see the bottom of this post, before the comments section. Sociable supports many more services than the ones I’m showing.

Subscribe To Comments
Allows your users to subscribe to the comments of a certain post when they are making a comment. This is particularly useful if users are seeking support for something you’ve written about. Whenever a new comment is made, they will receive an e-mail, letting them know there might be an answer to their question.

Ultimate Tag Warrior
Mmmmm. This plugin converts your blog from taxonomy to folksonomy in the sense that it lets you tag your posts rather than categorize them (or both). Personally, I keep categories as broad as possible, then add tags to posts to specify what I’m writing about. For an example, see the top of this post, which shows this was posted in Internet and Software. Now, take a look at the bottom of the post, which shows that this is tagged with the tag WordPress. UTW also lets you make a tag cloud, an awesome thing. You can see the tag cloud for Sheeped on the Archives page.

Videos with Wordpress
This is by far the easiest-to-use plugin of this type I’ve found so far. It lets you embed Google, YouTube, etc. Videos in your posts with very short tags, e.g. google 4183875433858020781 (surrounded by brackets). For an example, see the post on Parallel Universes I made a while back.

WordPress Reports
This plugin shows you (both) your Google Analytics and FeedBurner stats from within the WP admin panel. Very cool.

WP-Cache
This is THE single most useful WordPress plugin in my opinion. Everyone should use this. It automatically caches your pages and serves them from static files rather than making up to 30 SQL queries per page. I’ve been using it for ages with a cache time-out setting of 2592000 seconds (24 hours if I remember correctly) without any visual abnormalities. The cache is automatically cleared whenever a new post or comment is made. I’m telling you, this plugin could be what makes the difference between life and death if you get dugg/slashdotted/etc - and it’s basically transparent.

Note: If you make any changes to your blog’s template or core files, you will need to clear the cache manually.

WP ContactForm
Shows a simple contact form, allowing your visitors to reach you easily. For an example, see the Contact page.

WP-DBManager
WP-DBManager allows you to backup, restore, delete (if you really want to) and best of all, defragment your MySQL-database from within the WordPress administration panel.

WP-Lightbox2
Also one of my favorites. This plugin opens images in a very pretty AJAX window, allowing users to see images (even a series of images) on the page rather than having to navigate back and forth. For a demonstration, click this link to an image.

—

In case I fall in love with any more plugins, I will update this post.

Feel free to share your thoughts/problems of/with any of these add-ons by commenting!

WordPress 2.1 has just been released. It includes several improved/new features and over 550 bug fixes. Some of the nicest new features are that posts are automatically saved while you’re editing, you can switch between WYSIWYG and code editing instantly while writing, you can hide your blog from search engines, and there’s a new version of Akismet!

One thing I really don’t like about this new release is that !–more– tags also cut RSS feeds — I like to have my frontpage show a minimized list of the most recent posts, but allow RSS-subscribed users to read the full contents of my posts — but… I guess showing full post content on the frontpage as well makes more sense. If you take a look at the frontpage, you’ll notice that Sheeped now makes more sense!

As always, the newest version of Wordpress is available on the WP Download Page.