Thu 2012-07-12 A few of web pages that I found useful when I wanted to create a launcher for a shell script in Ubuntu 12.04 LTS:
Desktop files: putting your application on the desktop menus from Gnome Dev Center
Desktop Entry Specification from freedesktop.org
Registered Categories in Desktop Menu Specification from freedesktop.org
Tue 2012-07-10 A couple of blog posts that I found useful when setting up my development web-server on Ubuntu 12.04 LTS:
How to Install a PHP PECL extension/module on Ubuntu by Mark Foster
Send-only Mail Server with Exim on Ubuntu 10.04 LTS (Lucid) by Phil Paradis
Sun 2012-03-11 In Ubuntu 10.04 LTS the default install of BackupPC stores all the backups in the directory /var/lib/backuppc which is located on the main hard disk drive /dev/sda. However, I wanted to store all my backups on an external USB hard disk drive /dev/sdb. This post records what I had to do to get this to work.
The external hard disk drive came with its disk preformatted as an NTFS file system. This file system does not support hard links which are critical for the efficient operation of BackupPC, so first we reformat the disk to EXT4 (a file system that does support hard links).
Display the partitions (I use parted rather than fdisk because its display is a bit clearer):
sudo parted -l
Create an new /dev/sdb1 partition (here I use with fdisk because parted could not create EXT4 file systems):
sudo fdisk /dev/sdb
c (disable msdos mode)
u (set units to sectors)
d (delete partition 1)
1
n (create new primary partition 1)
p
1
<Enter>Use default first and last sectors
<Enter>
w (Write out the new partition table)
Check the /dev/sdb1 partition exists (but the file system column is blank):
sudo parted -l
Now we make the EXT4 files system:
sudo mkfs -t EXT4 /dev/sdb1
Now check the partition is now EXT4:
sudo parted -l
Now we actuall install BackupPC:
sudo apt-get install backuppc
Set the password for account 'backuppc':
sudo htpasswd /etc/backuppc/htpasswd backuppc
Point your web browser at http:/backuppc and log in as 'backuppc' with the password you have just set up. The BackupPC Server Status page should be displayed (it doesn't matter if there are some failed backups listed at the bottom of the page).
Copy the BackupPC data directory contents to the external hard disk drive:
sudo cp -r /var/lib/backuppc /media/usb0
And set its owner to 'backuppc':
sudo chown -R backuppc:backuppc /media/usb0/backuppc
Check the new data directory is present and has the right permissions:
sudo ls -al /media/usb0
And check its contents:
sudo ls -al /media/usb0/backuppc
Remove the old BackupPC data directory:
sudo rm -r /var/lib/backuppc
And replace it with a symbolic link to the new data directory (note the order of the parameters is target path before link path):
sudo ln -s /media/usb0/backuppc /var/lib/backuppc
Set the owner of the symbolic link to 'backuppc':
sudo chown -h backuppc:backuppc /var/lib/backuppc
Check the symbolic link is present and has the right permissions:
sudo ls -al /var/lib
And check that it links to the right contents:
sudo ls -al /var/lib/backuppc
Restart the server (just to make sure everything reinitializes):
sudo shutdown -r now
Point your web browser at http:/backuppc. The BackupPC Server Status page should be displayed. BackupPC is running with the data directory on the external hard disk drive.
Tue 2012-03-06 I just noticed an option to log in as 'guest' on our Ubuntu laptop. I cannot remember asking for it, and I certainly don't want it, so I looked for a way to disable it. In Ubuntu 10.04 LTS the guest option is provided by the package gdm-guest-session. I went into the Synaptic package manager and uninstalled it. After logging out and in again, the guest option is no more.
Sun 2012-02-26 I recently installed BackupPC on my Ubuntu 10.04 LTS web server. I did this by entering 'sudo apt-get install backuppc'. Initially I couldn't get the backuppc web interface to work. Going to http://192.168.0.1/backuppc in a web browser only gave a '404 Not Found' error.
I tracked down the reason for this to me having failed to explicitly selected 'Apache2' as the BackupPC web server. During installation a page something like this had been presented:
Select web server
[ ] Apache2
<ok>
I had just hit <enter> assuming that 'Apache2' was the default (there were no other alternatives after all). What I should have done was hit the spacebar to select 'Apache2' and then hit <enter>.
I fixed the problem by completely removing BackupPC ('sudo apt-get purge backuppc') and then reinstalling ('sudo apt-get install backuppc') taking care to hit the spacebar at the appropriate point.
The lack of clear instructions on the above installation page might be regarded as a bug in the BackupPC installation process.
Tristram Brelstaff
It turns out that I had an almost identical problem a year and half ago when installing PhpMyAdmin.
