For the last month or so I’ve been using the GL Matrix screensaver built into Gnome as my desktop background, and I’m probably not ever going back to a standard background. Other then the fact that it only takes up 10~15 megabytes to run, it doubles as a screensaver. Finding good 1680×1050 backgrounds isn’t an easy task either..

At any rate, if you would like to use the GL Matrix screensaver as your background you must first disable the nautilus desktop:

gconftool-2 --type bool --set /apps/nautilus/preferences/show_desktop false

Now let’s make the desktop entry for our xserver autostart:

gedit ~/.config/autostart/glmatrix.desktop

Just paste the following into your editor and then save it:

[Desktop Entry]
Version=1.0
Encoding=UTF-8
Name=No name
Name[en_IN]=Desktop matrix
Exec=/usr/lib/xscreensaver/glmatrix -root
X-GNOME-Autostart-enabled=true

Once you have done that, restart Gnome by hitting Ctrl+Alt+Backspace.

Going back to the original nautlius desktop is simple:

gconftool-2 --type bool --set /apps/nautlius/preferences/show_desktop true && nautilus

Be sure to grab this package, if you’re doing any major PHP development on your Ubuntu box.

Running PHP interactively is a fun and productive way to debug and test out your applications code without having to refresh your browser every time you make a change.

Besides having to install the package, you have to add the -a flag to /usr/bin/php under the terminal.

/usr/bin/php -a

It’s that simple. You can use absolute paths when including files, or cd into your applications directory and begin relatively including your code base.

While you could technically run your entire application under the interactive console, I would highly discern anyone from doing so. I recommend you just include the current file you are testing and work out any bugs one at a time.

I know a lot of developers are using and writing their own test modules to debug their code for them, but I prefer to be face-to-face with my code when I’m testing. You start to build a familiarity with your code in doing so and finding better ways to do things when you’re dealing with it personally. After all you’re going to be the one documenting and interfacing with the code, be one with the code.

So the other day I decided to upgrade to Ubuntu Hardy Heron, and after a few days of testing it out I was getting some very strange memory leaks. Also, there were “zombie” processes hanging under “sh” that I couldn’t probe. Fed up with current circumstances in the bloated-Linux-world, I decided to switch back to the tried and true - after all I really had no reason to not switch back other then my undeniable hatred for the Lilo bootloader.

I got over it, and got it up and running late last night. This morning I got the latest nvidia drivers running, as well as my adjusted my sound card levels. Much to my suprise this sound card (Audigy 2) works great under slack.

My first hurdle was getting mysql to start.. I kept getting a nohup error and it wasn’t allowed to connect to the mysql socket. First things first, permissions and users.. make sure the server isn’t running:

ps xa | grep mysql

You should only see your grep process in the list of processes and you’re good to move on.

sudo chown -R mysql:mysql /var/lib/mysql/
sudo chown -R mysql:mysql /var/run/mysql/

Next we need to get our config in place:

sudo mv /etc/my-small.cnf /etc/my.cnf

After that we can run the database installer:

sudo /usr/bin/mysql_install_db

Once that is complete, we can start up the server:

sudo /usr/share/mysql/mysql.server start

We’ll also want to move the mysql script to our rc.d folder so that it can be started upon boot:

sudo cp /usr/share/mysql/mysql.server /etc/rc.d/rc.mysql
sudo chmod 644 /etc/rc.d/rc.mysql

Lastly we’ll create a new password for the root user in mysql:

sudo /usr/bin/mysqladmin -u root password 'your password here'

That’s all, you should now be able to connect to the server just fine. If you need any help with Mysql commands and command-line syntax check this out.