# aptitude install php-elisp

A full day of presentations and participation on free software.

More info: http://www.ableconf.com/

Update: A good time and a good place to meet like-minded folks and get up to speed on new technology, and even a few “Aha!” moments on how to do things better. See you next year!

deb http://www.backports.org/debian/ lenny-backports main contrib non-free

Run the following:

#aptitude update
#aptitude install debian-backports-keyring

(Ignore any warning that occur with the above 2 commands, the install will correct those)
If you run #aptitude update again the warnings should be gone

2) Install Adobe Flash

#aptitude install flashplugin-nonfree

3)You shouldn’t need this step, but just in case run

and make sure the correct one (/usr/lib/flashplugin-nonfree/libflashplayer.so) is selected. It should be the current default.

4) Start Iceweasel and go the location about:plugins and you should see the latest Flash.

I would have thought this would be called “Always On Top” (Gnome has an Always On Top setting, but it doesn’t help here) or something useful. “Utility Window” doesn’t explain that it’s an “Always in your way” window… someone needs to find better words!

GD under PHP not installed by default

WordPress and other PHP systems were reporting errors about “imagecreatefromjpeg not defined” … that’s a PHP built-in function… what gives?  Somehow I didn’t have the GD image manipulation module loaded into PHP.  Here’s how to do that.

# sudo apt-get install php5-gd
# /etc/init.d/apache2 restart

Locales not installed by default

(reported solved in Debian 5.0.2)

Apt-get was reporting huge batches of errors like:

perl: warning: Falling back to the standard locale ("C").
/usr/bin/mandb: can't set the locale; make sure $LC_* and $LANG are correct
manconv: can't set the locale; make sure $LC_* and $LANG are correct

The solution is to:

apt-get install locales
dpkg-reconfigure locales

and I added the locale:  en_US.UTF-8 UTF-8

dpkg-reconfigure locales

First we download the RPM for RedHat Enterprise Linux 5 (RHEL 5) which is the equivalent to Centos from the virtualbox.org site

After downloading (and renaming the file to eliminate everything after the .rpm) we install as follows but get an error:

# rpm -ivh VirtualBox-2.1.0_(version).rpm
...
No precompiled module for this kernel found! ...
Compilation of kernel module FAILED! ...
Please consult
   /var/log/vbox-install.log
to find out why the kernel module does not compile.
Most probably the kernel sources are not found.
Install them and execute
   /etc/init.d/vboxdrv setup
as root.

To rectify this:

# yum install SDL kernel-devel kernel-headers
# KERN_DIR=/usr/src/kernels/2.6.18-whatever-your-current-kernel
# export KERN_DIR
# /etc/init.d/vboxdrv setup

Then add users to the vboxusers group:

# /usr/sbin/usermod -a -G vboxusers yourusername

and you should be able to launch VirtualBox from the Applications / System Tools menu.

Have fun!

1. Download Thunderbird 2 from Mozilla (http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/thunderbird/) or other mirros like (http://mirror.oscc.org.my/mozilla/thunderbird/). I downloaded thunderbird-2.0.0.14.tar.gz to the directory /tmp.
2. Extract the files
3. Open a terminal and login as root to the directory /opt
   

   su -
   cd /opt

   4. Copy the extracted forlders to /opt
   cp -rf /tmp/thunderbird /opt

   5. Install the older library of libstdc++.so.5 (5.1 comes with version libstdc++.so.6)
   yum install compat-libstdc++-33.i386

   6. Test the Thunderbird as a normal user
   /opt/thunderbird/thunderbird

   7. Copy the icons to the user wide pixmap
   cp thunderbird/icons/mozicon*.xpm /usr/share/pixmaps/

   8. When Thunderbird starts, it complains about the mode for /var/spool/mail, as it cannot write to this folder. As root do the following
   chmod 01777 /var/spool/mail

Add the application launcher in the panel/menu using the mozicon icon. Only things left is to install other plugins. My first plugins are always the Calendar (lightning) and birthday.