Ubuntu

My upgrade from Lucid to Precise did not go well and I've been battling errors ever since. I ran into the following error when trying to reinstall the php5-gd extension for PHP:
No apport report written because MaxReports is reached already

After my upgrade from Lucid to Precise (and thereby, from MySQL 5.1 to 5.5), I found that my MySQL instance was not running. When I tried to start the service all I got back was that it had failed to start.

I checked the system log (sudo tail /var/log/syslog) to see if I could divine the cause of this issue and I found the following messages:
init: mysql post-start process (5075) terminated with status 1
mysql respawning too fast, stopped

After an upgrade from Lucid to Precise, my PHP install started complaining about a library:

PHP Warning: PHP Startup: Unable to load dynamic library '/usr/lib/php5/20090626+lfs/gd.so'

While I've got a hunch that the actual problem is related to issues I had during the upgrade, turning this error (and other similar ones) off is as simple as going into /etc/php5/conf.d and renaming the file, in this case gd.ini to something like gd.ini.bak.

So I tried updating one of my boxen running the Lucid Kubuntu LTS to the new Precise Pangolin beta. During the upgrade, I received an error message stating that adobe-flashplugin could not be upgraded. I ignored it and continued with the upgrade and all went swimmingly. Once the upgrade was completed and I had rebooted, when I tried to run an apt-get update, I ran into an error with respect to the adobe-flashplugin package. When I tried to remove it, it did not work. As a stop-gap measure, I removed a number of packages that depended on it including Firefox and sun-java6.

On an Ubuntu box, I tried using the locate command to find information about a package and ran into the following error:

mlocate: can not stat () `/var/lib/mlocate/mlocate.db': No such file or directory

The locate program (should) routinely builds a database of files on the box and searches it when we call it. As the error message states, this database appears to be missing thereby leading to the error. Fixing it is as simple as calling:
updatedb

which should build the database.

Hope this helps!

I ran into the following error when I added a new repository to my kubuntu box and ran apt-get update:
E: Dynamic MMap ran out of room. Please increase the size of APT::Cache-Limit. Current value: 123123. (man 5 apt.conf)

To fix this, navigate to /etc/apt/apt.conf.d and edit the file related to debconf which in my case was 70debconf. Add the following line to the bottom of this file and save it:
APT::Cache-Limit "200000000";

Finding all the members of a group is an occasional requirement and while there are a number of ways to do this by parsing the /etc/group and /etc/password files, Debian/Ubuntu come with a simpler solution that performs all this skulduggery for you. This is the members function that can simply be installed using sudo apt-get install members . Once this is done, members of a group named foo can be listed using:
members foo.

Earlier today, I noticed - in htop - that a particular process, let's say 'foo-123', was running even though I had removed the package 'foo' many days earlier. I tried removing it again and found that I was right and that the package had already been removed. The package dependency list was way too long for me to go removing them one by one, or parsing them out and removing the lot.

IRC, however, was very obliging to my query and provided me with the below-pasted nifty solution that did not allow any odd gimmickry:
sudo aptitude search '~i' | grep foo

The Internet will go bust without DNS and the following is a guide to setting up your own DNS server to provide information about your domains and associated services. While this task can be accomplished very easily when using a hosting control panel, it is great fun to set things up on your own.

While trying to check the vhost configuration on my Kubuntu dev box, I had to run httpd -S. Of course, since ubuntu renamed httpd to apache (a bit like calling a Veyron a Bugatti), I had to run apache2 -S. This however led to the following error message:
apache2: bad user name ${APACHE_RUN_USER}