I've noticed a few people using the idiomatic phrase "prime of place" to denote the primacy of position in a group of things. For example, "My framed moustache-of-the-year certificate is given prime of place on the wall". While the idiom certainly appears to make sense, fits in quite well, and even sounds familiar, it is not really standard usage.

In Kubuntu/Ubuntu (and presumably Debian and other derivatives), the CTRL + ALT + F4 (or any other function key) keyboard shortcut switches from the desktop to a virtual terminal while CTRL + ALT + F7 brings you back to the desktop. However, I want to disable this as it's messing up my HTPC thanks to its dodgy remote control. While I could find a solution for Gnome/Ubuntu readily enough, KDE/Kubuntu was not immediately apparent.

I ran into the following error while running a script that was performing backups of files via rsync over ssh.

error: ssh: connect to host foo.example.com port 22: Connection refused rsync: connection unexpectedly closed (0 bytes received so far) [sender] rsync error: unexplained error (code 255) at io.c(601) [sender=3.0.7]

I ran into the following spiel when I attempted to SSH to a host just now:

Setting the timezone of an Ubuntu (14.04, Trusty) or Debian (7, Wheezy) server from the command-line is simple. Just run dpkg-reconfigure tzdata and follow the on-screen prompts. However, if you are running an unattended installation, you might want to avoid interactive prompts and just gets the job done. To do this, simply run

$ sudo ln -sf /usr/share/zoneinfo/America/Anchorage /etc/localtime

Browse through /usr/share/zoneinfo/ to locate your timezone.

So, here I was writing a script that would automate the installation of a package in Ubuntu 14.04 and all was going swimmingly. Until I ran it. You know how some apt-get installs sometimes involve a technicolor pop-up that asks you for stuff? Well, those pop-ups interrupted my script which didn't proceed further. After much digging, I found that there are a couple of solutions for this:

On a new Ubuntu 14.04 (Trusty) LTS server, I ran into the following:

$ su -c /bin/bash foo
bash: cannot set terminal process group (3987): Inappropriate ioctl for device
bash: no job control in this shell

However, the su procedure worked and I was logged in as user foo.

After upgrading a Debian install to use PHP 5.4, I ran into the following error:

PHP Warning: Unknown: It is not safe to rely on the system's timezone settings. You are *required* to use the date.timezone setting or the date_default_timezone_set() function. In case you used any of those methods and you are still getting this warning, you most likely misspelled the timezone identifier. We selected the timezone 'UTC' for now, but please set date.timezone to select your timezone. in Unknown on line 0

OpenAtrium is a Drupal "distribution", a pre-packaged Drupal installation which targets a particular niche. I was told to consider it when I went looking for a support ticket package a couple of years ago. That project fell by the wayside but I did have a demo installation on my system and now that I do need to install a ticket management system again, I looked at resurrecting this installation and updating it for some snazzy new features.

Let's assume that we have some sample text like the following:

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum.