the

Little Projects

of Shawn M. Jones

As I’ve been testing out Gmail for my domain, I read in “Google Apps: The Missing Manual” that the Google Toolbar had all kinds of nice buttons that integrated nicely with Google Apps. The problem is, with initial install, that the Google Toolbar would only work with my initial Google account and not the one associated with my domain, where my central email would be accessed.

This site gives information on how to change the Gmail button to act the same, but for Google Apps for Your Domain (cutely abbreviated GAFYD in the article):
http://tech.blorge.com/Structure:%20/2008/02/23/google-toolbar-for-firefox-make-the-gmail-button-work-with-google-apps/

This interesting set of circumstances actually exists, and quite frequently, evidently.

I recently began running Kubuntu on my laptop and started sharing the NTFS partition between Kubuntu and Windows. Unfortunately, after installing VMWare, I found out that VMWare wouldn’t start any of my virtual machines.

I was quite confused. I’d done this so many times on CentOS, I didn’t really expect Kubuntu/Ubuntu, a more user-friendly Linux distribution, to have any issues.

Well, I was wrong. It turns out that adding

mainMem.useNamedFile = "FALSE"

to the given virtual machine’s .vmx file fixes the problem.

This option forces VMWare to actually use the OS’s swap partition rather than making a swap file. Creating the swap file on NTFS seems to be an issue with NTFS on Kubuntu.

I’ve been using makeself from http://megastep.org/makeself/.

This is an excellent tool for distributing self-extracting executables.

There is one issue that was not apparent to me. You can tell the resulting script to execute a file within the archive after extraction. Hence, the following will run test.sh after setup extracts everything:

./makeself.sh --compress ~/tmp setup "Test Installation Setup" ./test.sh

./test.sh is what is extracted. The leading ./ is necessary because the file is executed relative to the extracted directory.

If the Tikiwiki install generates a blank screen, it could be (it was for me) because you don’t have the php-mysql package installed.

CentOS 5 does not install the php-mysql package by default.

This is required by Tikiwiki if you are using mysql (obviously).

Configuring CentOS 5 host for sharing home directories over samba.

Create a samba user:

smbpasswd -a smjones

Start Samba:

/sbin/service smb start

Make sure it will start on next boot:

/sbin/chkconfig --level 2345 smb on

Make sure SELinux doesn’t stop us from sharing home directories:

/usr/sbin/setsebool -P samba_enable_home_dirs on