New Hosting provider and WordPress Maintenance

Posted on July 29, 2010 by Brian

An invoice to renew my Web Hosting and the need to update WordPress resulted in a bit of work.

I had been with Hostingbegins for a number of years as my hosting provider, but they have recently been bought out by Othello, the price rocketed and what I was getting went down. The final straw was discovering that the advertised prices were plus VAT. After a quick scan I settled on Webhosting Uk. I get more space, more bandwidth, MySQL (I only had it with Othello as I had it before they took it over), unlimited email etc. Basically more for no increase. The online support chat was excellent and it is a UK based company.

Migrating was easy, I gave them my old cPanel login and password (having taken a full backup of course) and they transferred the lot. As I manage my own DNS record I simply updated the A record and a few hours later the DNS records seem to be updated. I changed the WordPress theme after the transfer occurred, but before I changed the DNS so I knew when the new site was in use (cunning eh?).

At the same time I needed to upgrade my WordPress installation. I have used Fantastico before, but was never entirely happy and it didn’t like installations it hadn’t done. Softaculous on the other hand is simply a pleasure to use. Upgrading takes seconds and it seems to update its repository very quickly with newer versions.

Another thing I wanted to do was introduce a mobile theme / plugin. I settled on WordPress Mobile Pack. The themes seem quite good but there is currently a bug in the admin pages. I’m sure it will get fixed though.

I also plumped for the Twenty10 theme. I’m not a big fan of fiddling with themes but this one looks nice and clean. It did use a serif font for the main text and it took ages to find the right CSS entry to get rid of that!

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Mount a network folder automatically in Ubuntu

Posted on June 5, 2010 by Brian

One of the frustrations with Ubuntu, has been that there is no easy way to replicate the Windows function ‘map network drive’.

The best I have found is this thread. I still find it very slow to find the network location on my NasDuo but it gets there eventually.

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Acer Revo 3610 Ubuntu and HDMI

Posted on June 1, 2010 by Brian

Decided to get my Acer Revo 3610 connected to my nice new Sony TV. From reading on the web, it was clear that the Nvidia Ion graphics were more than capable of producing a good picture via the HDMI port. I had already installed the Nvidia Restricted driver so I hoped it was good to go.

So plugged in the TV via HDMI and re booted the Revo. Boots straight away using the TV as the monitor. Ok so that works but not really what I want as it is a desktop machine as well. Reboot, switch off TV – same result. Reboot – unplug HDMI – back to the VGA. So I need to configure the X setup.

Open the Nvidia tool on Ubuntu. Did some fiddling but could not save the config file. to cut a long story short, I realised that the Nvidia X Server utility was not opening as sudo so did not have write permissions on that folder. Easily solved by copying the launcher to the desktop and adding ‘gksu’ to the command in the properties. To change on the menu, right click on the Ubuntu logo in top left corner, select edit menus and edit the launcher.

Now I can edit the X Server settings. Usual caveats apply in taking backups of the files. I reconnected the TV HDMI cable then clicked ‘detect displays‘. A new item appears in the layout pane as ‘disabled‘. Select it then select configure. I chose separate X screen and apply. You do then need to write it to the config file before quitting

I wanted to restart the Xserver without rebooting and discovered it was very simple. ctl-alt-F1 drops you into a terminal. Login to that terminal and type gdm restart.

So now I have 2 screens, both with the usual Ubuntu menus. On the TV open VLC and play the movie file of your choice!

Except not quite as there was no sound. Again a bit of digging directed me to this thread. Alsamixer was already installed so running it from a terminal brings up a strange terminal GUI. Trick is to use arrow keys to cycle along to IE958 1 an use the ‘m’ key to un-mute the sound.

Try VLC again and all works perfectly.

In this case VLC is my palyer of choice as it will play my Toppy .rec files out of the box and gives a far superior picture than the SCART connection.

So happy days! There is abit more on this subject in this Wiki although it does not twig how to write the config files.

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More Ubuntu Lucid IPv6 problems – solved

Posted on May 21, 2010 by Brian

I have solved another IPv6 problems on Ubuntu Lucid 10.04. When trying to install a package (apt, aptitude or synaptic) wget has these symptoms;

--2010-05-21 20:05:55-- http://internap.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/corefonts/webdin32.exe
Resolving internap.dl.sourceforge.net... 1.0.0.0
Connecting to internap.dl.sourceforge.net|1.0.0.0|:80... failed: Connection timed out.
Giving up.

This example was when I was trying to download the fonts but I have seen it on several different attempted installs. It has been reported as a wget issue or a DNS Cache issue, but I am pretty certain it is an IPv6 issue, probably with the way the AAAA address is interpreted.

Anyway the solution is simple. Open up /etc/wgetrc as sudo and add this line at the end

inet4-only = on

That should solve it. It does the same as my earlier post but is a permanent solution.

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Firefox lost and missing bookmarks toolbar

Posted on May 7, 2010 by Brian

I use the FEBE extension to ‘clone’ my Firefox setup whenever I get a new system. Having installed Ubuntu Lucid I needed my firefox setup on it. Having backed up off one, I restored to the new. This was easier than usual as the extension now has the ability to create a new profile to restore to.

However I encountered a problem I had seen previously in that the bookmarks toolbar disappeared. The bookmarks are there but no toolbar. Googled to no avail but did find something that gave me an idea. I simply right clicked on the toolbar, select customise, then ‘restore default set’. Bingo – toolbar appears!

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