Linux

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

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:

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:

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:

All those who SSH into servers ought to use GNU Screen. The following is some additional configuration that can be added to a .screenrc file in your home directory. These lines do wonders to the usability of the system:

I recently had trouble with a MySQL installation in Ubuntu. For some reason or the other, during an upgrade to a newer version of mysql-server, the upgrade script had issues stopping the server and the script failed. This meant that apt could no longer function as it kept raising a red flag over the broken upgrade with the following instructions: