Linux

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

While transferring a file to a remote server is pretty easily done using PuTTY's sister program, pscp, sometimes one finds oneself to be too lazy to go through the steps required. Shouldn't it be possible to simply copy and paste the (text) file into a remote editor via PuTTY? It is and it works a peach. However, it does crack the shits every now and then complaining about the length of the clipboard (paste).

An easy avenue in Windows to change the encoding of a file is to open it in Notepad and then use the Save As option which allows you to specify the encoding that the file should be saved using ...

Linux does offer a bunch of solutions too, albeit perhaps relatively less simple:

Earlier today, I wanted to recover some files that I'd added to version control (for safe keeping). However, I did not want to retain the pesky .svn files that plague every directory in the tree (unlike the wonderful git). GOOG directed me to solutions that all rely on Linux tools to do the trick. The following does work admirably:

find . -type d -name '.svn' -print -exec rm -rf {} \;

The latest version of Picasa (v3.9) is armed with Google Plus support. I suppose that this is fine even though Google Plus is inherently evil (albeit not as evil as Facebook). However, the application's camera support is lacking and Google has officially stopped supporting the product under Linux. They've also pulled many of the links and even download sites and archive sites are oddly only providing v3.9. However, Google's own servers continue to (knowingly or unknowingly) host to install file for the admirable robust v3.8. Here it is:

I ran into the following error (or something like it) while setting up Drupal's xmlsitemap module:

public://xmlsitemap/lOtsOfgoBBlDegOOk not found or not writable

This is as expected some kind of permissions issue. Why the module can't sort this on its own, I do not know. As with everything Drupal, clear the cache first to see if that fixes things. It sometimes does. If not, you will need to get your hands dirty on the commandline (if linux):

Here are some postfix queue management commands that I find myself using regularly (on an Ubuntu server):

Fresh install of Ubuntu Server 12.04 LTS: After installed SSHD, I found that logging in remotely was a time-consuming process as the password prompt took ages to pop up after the username prompt. Binging about, I found that this was due to SSHD performing a reverse DNS lookup of my IP to potentially check if all is kosher. Turning this check off fixes the issue: