Gnome-shell in Ubuntu 9.10

Even though gnome-shell is really only a preview of what is to come for gnome 3.0 and it's still buggy and sometimes not completely stable perhaps, I really like it.

When I first saw the screenshots I was less then impressed, I thought it didn't at all look like anything new or innovative, but rather messy and confusing. But me being ever interested in new things and all I just had to give it a try (the gnome-panel look was starting to bore me).

Installing was easy

sudo apt-get install gnome-shell

and starting it afterwards was easy too

gnome-shell -r

Though first I had to disable compiz, which I don't really use anyway.
I was also using avant-window-navigator, which disappeared on me but still kept part of my notification area to itself. So the time after that I first closed AWN and all was as it should be.

I didn't feel like having to manually start gnome-shell every time I logged in so I started looking into a way to replace metacity and gnome-panel with gnome-shell and found that this could be done by editing you gconf (with, for example, gconf-editor) and setting the /desktop/gnome/session/required_components/windowmanager key from metacity to gnome-shell.

Of course, since it is a composited window manager you need a video card and driver that can handle screen compositing.

mod_rewrite with Fedora 10 and ISPConfig for WordPress

This relates to Fedora 10 and ISPConfig 3.0.1 set up as described in this HowtoForge post

One of my colleagues recently got interested in offering our clients Wordpress as a content management system, so he's been trying it out.
Yesterday he found out that if he wanted to change the permalink style in Wordpress he needed write access to .htaccess, which he didn't have because the user rights haven't been set up very well there.
So I gave him write access by using

chown apache:apache .htaccess

Unfortunately this resulted in a 500 Interal Server Error.
Looking at the error log for the website I tried this for it let me know that RewriteEngine directives were not allowed in the .htaccess.
Since I didn't want to mess with the base configurations of ISPConfig I started looking around for other options. Eventually I found that I had to add something similar to this to the Apache directives field under options under the website's settings

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
  <Directory /var/www/[sitename]/web/>
    Options +FollowSymLinks
    RewriteEngine On
    RewriteBase /
    RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
    RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
    RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
  </Directory>
</IfModule>

Of course [sitename] should be replaced with the name of your website.

It all works after I restarted the apache server myself, but I do not know if that is completely necessary. Also it might take a few seconds before ISPConfig finishes editing the configuration file.

Higher Resolution in Fedora 11 with proprietary NVidia Drivers

Ugh... I have been screwing around with this since the beginning of time... Or at least since I installed Fedora for the so-manieth time. Finally though I found out what I had to do.

Following this guide, I was able to easily and correctly install the drivers. I used to build them myself, but that got me worse results then anything.
To sum up, though:

# switch to super user (root)
su
# install rpmfusion repository
rpm -Uvh \
http://download1.rpmfusion.org/free/fedora/rpmfusion-free-release-stable.noarch.rpm \
http://download1.rpmfusion.org/nonfree/fedora/rpmfusion-nonfree-release-stable.noarch.rpm
# install the driver (I have an i686 pc, you might need a different architecture, like 64_32 or something similar)
yum install kmod-nvidia xorg-x11-drv-nvidia-libs.i586
# reboot to make changed take effect
reboot

This only got me a 1024x768 resolution, though... Which pissed me off...

I started looking around the internet for a way to fix it in the xorg.conf itself, which I'd done on Fedora 9 before, but didn't remember how (the reason I'm writing this right now), but didn't actually find what I was looking for.

In the end I found 2 supposed fixes, one added a Modes option to the "Display" section of the "Screen" section, and another was to add a DisplaySize option to the "Monitor" section.
Well, I found out I needed both, so I added DisplaySize 1280 1024 to the "Monitor" section and Modes "1280x1024" to the "Display" subsection of the "Screen" section.

Now it's working again, running at 1280x1024 with screen compositing (so I can run gnome-do with docky theme, which I'm trying out for a while).

A simple gnome-blog test

I've been looking for some way to post blog entries from my desktop for a while now, I've come across Drivel (which crashes when I try to log in to blogger with it), can't find a Bleezer package at work (just checked it, first time I heard of it today) and no other gtk/gnome client seems appealing.

Let's see what this gnome-blog app does.

Not much so far, bold or italic seems the be the only options available to me at the moment, let's see about HTML:

to install gnome-blog in Ubuntu 9.04 use

sudo apt-get install gnome-blog

and the rest should then be self-evident.

Removing a service manually in Windows Server 2008

I was writing a test Windows Service and accidentally removed it through the Programs and Features dialog, which removes the files, but doesn't actually remove the service from the service list. So when I tried to install the 2nd version of this test service it was complaining that it already existed.

I looked around a little and found that I could delete the Service from the registry in HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\[Your service]. I deleted the key (the little folder thingy) and it did show some change, but my service was still there and the newer version still wouldn't install.

After a little more looking around I found out that to fix it I could use sc delete [YourService] to fix it. And it did!

Next time, though, I really should use the installer I used to install it to remove it...