Encountered this whilst attempting to upgrade phpBB using svn:

SQL ERROR [ mysql4 ]

Unknown column 'g.group_skip_auth' in 'where clause' [1054]

SQL

SELECT a.forum_id, a.auth_option_id, a.auth_role_id, a.auth_setting
FROM acl_groups a, user_group ug, groups g
WHERE a.group_id = ug.group_idAND g.group_id = ug.group_id
  AND ug.user_pending = 0
  AND NOT (ug.group_leader = 1 AND g.group_skip_auth = 1)
  AND ug.user_id = 22

BACKTRACE

The solution took awhile to determine but it's quite simple. Go to your board's database update module at:

http://example.com/install/database_update.php

which will add the requisite columns to the tables.

Try the command-line utilities:

# /usr/local/psa/bin/mail -i user@example.com

An excellet collection is Hiren's Boot CD

In the process of splitting one existing Wordpress site (comprised mostly of hierarchically arranged Pages, not posts) I needed to export a batch of pages into the new one. Here's how to modify your wp-admin/includes/export.php to do that.

First we find the ID number of the parent page that we want to export. This process will export that page and all its sub-pages (children), sub-sub-pages, etc. You can find this by hovering over the "Edit" link in the Wordpress "Pages/Edit" area and noting the "&post=number" section. In my case it was "2" -- that's the number we will use below.

In wp-admin/includes/export.php, find the lines:

// grab a snapshot of post IDs, just in case it changes during the export
$post_ids = $wpdb->get_col("SELECT ID FROM $wpdb->posts $where ORDER BY post_date_gmt ASC");

Comment that out, and replace with:

# Export only a particular page and all its children
$post_ids = array();
$new_pages = array();
$new_pages[] = 2; # Parent page ID, which we will export, along with all its children
while (count($new_pages)) {
  $where = "WHERE post_parent IN (".join(',', $new_pages).")";
  foreach ($new_pages as $np) {
    $post_ids[] = $np;
  }
  $new_pages = array();
  $new_pages = $wpdb->get_col("SELECT ID FROM $wpdb->posts $where ORDER BY post_date_gmt ASC");
}
# $post_ids array now contains the pages we wish to export

Simply run the Export process and you will have just those pages.

If you want support for MP3 files, Youtube video, and Java on your webpages, you could hunt down several packages - or just install the ubuntu-restricted-extras package install all the codecs and other files in one step. This also includes Microsoft core fonts.

sudo apt-get install ubuntu-restricted-extras

Eliminate Irritating Update Notifier Pop-Unders

This from Joseph Sinclair

In Ubuntu 9.04, update-notifier doesn't display an icon, it actually runs update-manager full-screen as a "pop-under". It's easy to miss, and there's no way to make it NOT run (so on a laptop, for instance, where stupid useless no-change updates are pending, you'll get the blasted thing running every time you boot, and quite often multiple times in a session).

There is a "magic" command to make it stop and go back to how it used to run (which you may have to run regularly since some updates seem to overwrite it), but it must be run for every user who can run updates:

gconftool -s --type bool /apps/update-notifier/auto_launch false

Adding that to /etc/bash.bashrc seems to be a quick-and-dirty fix that restores it for every user, and resets it if it gets overwritten. There's no guarantee this will work after the 9.10 update, but at least it works for now.