I came across Gimparoo this morning on del.icio.us Popular. It’s a relatively new blog that aims to convert popular Photoshop tutorials for users of the Open Source GIMP image editor.

The author’s style is light and easy to follow, and the tutorials come complete with before and after screenshots and some process screenshots showing what settings were used.

There are some great tutorials on the site already, and perhaps it’s worth subscribing to to learn a bit more. The author of Gimparoo is also an open source advocate and gives a bit of information about his setup on the info page. Reading this stuff always gets me salivating for Kubuntu again!

Listible is a great resource for finding useful information. In true Web 2.0 tradition, it harnesses the wisdom of many to build definitive lists. If you’re a frequent visitor to the site, you might agree that the method is pretty hit and miss!

Anyway, Listible’s Open Source Applications For Windows list has become quite popular recently and I’ve dug in and tested a few of the programs.

It goes without saying that FireFox is my primary browser, and you’ll be aware of applications like Audacity, OpenOffice.org, and The GIMP (although not many people know there’s a Windows port of GIMP)

Aside from the better known apps, there are a few little gems that I haven’t heard about before.

7-Zip, for instance is a free zip utility that can handle a range of archive formats, meaning that you don’t need to have a copy of WinZip or WinRAR to open tar.gz files in Windows (something that I needed during my installation of Drupal)

The list has tons of other free resources for Windows, that might replace more expensive alternatives. This is certainly true of OpenOffice which would save you over £350.00 on the cost of Microsoft Office. Plus OpenOffice.org has PDF export capabilities which MS Office just doesn’t.

Because I develop sites using both ASP.NET and PHP, I’m tied to a Windows setup for the foreseeable future. However, I’ve been doing more and more work recently with LAMP-type applications which normally require a working Linux server installation.

Although I currently dual-boot with Kubuntu (because KDE’s pretty), I don’t have the Linux know-how to set up and run Apache/MySQL/PHP. XAMPP is a fantastic alternative, because it runs a fully configured LAMP setup on a Windows machine.

I installed it today for the first time, and one warning is to switch off or disable your IIS installation, because Apache will conflict with IIS for use of Port 80, and FileZilla will also clash with IIS for access to FTP on Port 21.

Anyway, I was able to install WordPress into a local folder in a matter of minutes and set up a new database in MySQL just as quickly using the bundled phpMyAdmin.

Also, I was able to enable mod_rewrite for my WordPress blog by modifying httpd.conf (in XAMPP/apache/conf/) - look for the line that identifies the rewrite module and remove the # from the start of the line. Restart your apache server and you’re all set.

This looks like it could be a lot of fun! The biggest advantage is being able to test and develop sites on my own test server, rather than constantly FTPing to a remote site.

I thought I’d already covered NTFS support in Kubuntu, but apparently not - that was CentOS. Just goes to show what an ‘authority’ I am on Linux! (By the way, back up everything before following any of my advice!)

Anyway, this evening I found myself needing to mount an NTFS partition from Kubuntu, and I couldn’t find any notes here!

So, for anyone who needs help accessing an NTFS partition using, here’s Navdeep Shergill’s guide to mounting Windows partitions under Kubuntu. This works well under the Kubuntu Dapper Drake release.

Just upgraded to the latest and greatest version of Kubuntu Linux yesterday, the Dapper Drake edition. Such a smooth upgrade path - just modify your /etc/apt/sources.list file, replacing every instance of breezy with dapper (back the file up first, of course), then you simply run the following commands:

sudo aptitude update
sudo aptitude dist-upgrade

I left mine to download and upgrade overnight and the next morning I had a fresh install of Kubuntu Dapper! Easy. And everything was intact from before - NTFS partitions mounted, FireFox on latest version, etc.

Only one problem - my mp3s wouldn’t play in amaroK. Since I spent a long time trawling the web for the solution, I’m going to make life easier for you and show you how to set up mp3 support in Kubuntu:

1. You need to add the Multiverse repository to /etc/apt/sources.list. Add the line deb http://nl.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ dapper multiverse. Apparently you modify the nl part to the country you’re in, so mine was gb
2. I think you have to do a quick update here, so from a console window run sudo aptitude update.
3. When that’s done, run the command sudo aptitude install libxine-extracodecs. This will install your mp3 support.
4. Run amaroK. You should probably restart the sound server with killall artsd, or reboot, but I found the mp3 support took effect straight away.

Anyway, I think that’s about right. Give it a go and see what happens, but remember to back stuff up, bless yourself (twice), and don’t blame me if it all goes wrong. I’m finding my way with this stuff too!

As you know, I’ve been getting to grips with CentOS, the Community ENTerprise Operating System.

Another little foible that CentOS inherits from Red Hat Enterprise is that it doesn’t include native support for MP3 playback. Again, down to legality/licensing issues. Damn those lawyers!

I did a bit of searching around, and there are a couple of fixes/work-arounds available to enable MP3 support in CentOS Linux. The one which worked out of the box for me was the XMMS MP3 plugin at Guru Labs. For my version of CentOS, I took an educated guess and installed the files for Red Hat Linux 9. This was a straight RPM package which I downloaded and installed.

Immediately afterward, the XMMS program was able to play my MP3 collection from my NTFS partition! I’m starting to enjoy this Linux stuff!

In deciding between various Linux distributions, a friend recently recommended that I look at CentOS. I duly tested it out for a bit on an old machine then decided to have a play on one of my regular PCs, setting it up to dual-boot with Windows XP.

Things were going fine until I needed to access my Windows XP partitions which were formatted with NTFS. Apparently due to concerns over licensing and the legally of tapping into the NTFS format, the CentOS developers (or more likely Red Hat) have decided not to build NTFS support in by default.

As with everything Linux, there is a way to work around this. And here it is.

The Linux-NTFS Project

A post in the CentOS Forums pointed me to the Linux-NTFS project website. This is a project dedicated to enabling reliable, full-featured access to NTFS filesystems from Linux. Just what we need!

First off, I’m using the current release of CentOS Linux, version 4.2. Apparently, this requires the same download as RedHat Enterprise 4. Now, before you start downloading stuff, run this quick test to determine your kernel version:

uname -r

You should get 2.6.9-22.EL as your result. If so, download the corrseponding NTFS RPM from the download page. There’s a convoluted Linux-y way to install the RPM file from the command line, but I just double-clicked to install. Haven’t noticed any disturbing side-effects so far….

Anyway, just execute the RPM and it’ll trigger the installation routine. Follow the prompts to the end.

Verifying The Install

The instructions ask us to verify the install before proceeding, so run the command below:

/sbin/modprobe ntfs

If you get errors, you’re got problems. If it all completes silently, run cat /proc/filesystems and check the output for NTFS. If you see NTFS - good - time to mount the drive!

Mounting Your NTFS Volume

Right, before you mount, you have to create a directory in Linux as your Mount Point. This will be the entry point to the NTFS volume, which you’d previously accessed through C:\ or D:\. To create the mount point:

mkdir /mnt/windows

Then you link the NTFS volume to the mount you just created:

mount /dev/hda1 /mnt/windows -t ntfs -r -o umask=0222

The mount command you just executed will give you access to the drive for your current session. If you want your NTFS drives to always be mounted, then you need to add some entries to the fstab in Linux. You can get more instructions on this from the Linux-NTFS website.

Kubuntu Linux has the root account disabled by default for security purposes. Users are encouraged to use the sudo command as an alternative whenever root-level priviledges are needed.

Now, maybe I’m too old-skool, but that’s just plain irritating.

Edit the kdmrc file

The first thing you need to do to enable root logons in Kubuntu is to modify the /etc/kde3/kdm/kdmrc file. However, to change this file - guess what? - you need root access! Here’s how to do it:

1. Press alt+F2 to call up the Run Command. Type in /etc/kde3/kdm to call up the kdm folder in Konqueror.
2. When the folder opens, you should see a file called kdmrc. Right-click it and select Actions, Edit As Root. You’ll be prompted for the root password (which should be your own password)
3. The file should open up in a text editor (KWrite on my installation). Broswe for the line AllowRootLogin=false and change false to true. Save the file and close it.

Enabling Root Logins (Modifying the Root User Account)

The second step here is to actually enable the root account for login, because it is disabled by default. There may be a quicker, more linux way to do this, but this is my method:

1. Press alt+F2 to call up the Run Command. Type in kuser to start up the KDE User Manager.
2. Double-click on the root entry to bring up the account properties and uncheck the Account Disabled checkbox. Click OK to save the changes.
3. Exit the KDE User Manager.

And that’s it! If you log off, you should now be able to login to Kubuntu as root.

Why Enable Root Logins?

Yes, I know that in an ideal world I would use sudo. Why did I absolutely require root access? Well…

1. I don’t know Linux very well. I can hold my own, but I don’t speak the command-line-lingo like the pros.
2. Elements of the GUI in Kubuntu don’t work so well. In particular, the network configuration utility ‘forgets’ the default gateway entry.
3. Some graphical tools also have an Administrator Mode button. I found in some instances that this didn’t work. You would type in credentials and it would return you to the same greyed-out screen, indicating that authentication had been rejected. Very frustrating.
4. Being fairly unfamiliar with Linux, I didn’t know the command equivalent for these graphical functions, so I couldn’t very well sudo them, could I?

If anybody reading this has any links to good newbie linux resources, let me know!!!

Kubuntu is a branch of the up and coming Ubuntu desktop Linux distribution. Where Ubuntu is based on the Gnome desktop system, Kubuntu is based on KDE (hence the K).

I’ve not used Linux in a long while, and fancied a bit of a mess around, perhaps to mess about with it as a LAMP web server. I initially downloaded and installed Ubuntu, but I’ve never liked the Gnome interface. I was about to ditch the idea completely when I discovered there was a KDE-based offshoot.

The biggest irritation for me is the default security option - the root account is disabled by default. The first user is granted superuser privileges which they can execute via command line using sudo and the command they want to execute. In some of the GUI consoles, there’s an Administrator Mode button which doesn’t seem to work very well as far as I can tell. I’ve managed to hack the system so that I can logon as root and make administrative changes that way. Not totally secure, but less hassle. I’m not using it for anything critical at the moment anyway.

Kubuntu: A Viable Desktop Operating System?

Is Kubuntu a viable alternative to Windows XP? Not quite at the moment, but it’s gaining momentum.

Two major failings are:

1. Still not enough major-label software available for Linux. That includes driver support for contemporary hardware devices.
2. K/Ubuntu has a few frustrating bugs that need to be squashed. While ‘us techies’ will be able to work around them, normal Joes will end up irritated and potentially walks away.

Still, there’s so much potential in a system like Kubuntu. For an average user - my wife, for instance - all she needs is a web browser, word processor and possibly an email client, although with Gmail that’s not such an issue. For me, I’d be looking for my Dreamweaver, my Photoshop and a host of other applications that I rely on to do my work, and although there are ways to make Windows applications run on Linux, I’ve not had the time to explore this. I suspect regular users won’t want to waste time with it either.

Anyway, the jury’s out on Kubuntu Linux. I’m giving it a trial on an old machine, so if there’s anything interesting with Kubuntu, I’ll post it here.

Yesterday my Windows XP Pro PC had a hissy fit and crashed. Rebooted and got the Blue Screen Of Death. Rebooted successfully to safe mode, then into normal functionality. Or so I thought…

So, I was immediately able to connect to the network, log on and access the internet and work with my exchange mailbox. The first indication of problems was when I tried to access my documents on a network share. I started getting messages about the Network Service not being started.

I started troubleshooting basic functionality: pinged a few local servers, checked out DNS resolution, etc and it was all fine. Tried a net use to connect a network drive, but this failed. I checked the various network services and all were running normally, so I tried to simply browse the network through the childishly-named My Network Places, but got a similar “Unable to browse the network” error, along with “The network is not present or not started”. Shit! Enter Google…

Turns out whatever happened screwed up a registry value which bizarrely allowed other network access, but not UNC-type stuff. I found a thread at CryptoOnline that pointed me through to the official fix at Microsoft. Follow this fix and you should be able to browse the network again immediately without a reboot.

Hope this helps anyone who has suffered the same problem.