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.