sudo apt-get install php5 libapache-mod-php5
sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart

failed to work after creating a phpinfo.php file in the /var/www/ root folder. Firefox complained, “You have chosen to open phpinfo.php which is a: PHP file.” Apache was not using the PHP preprocessor for some reason. A bunch of forum posts and blogs said to edit either /etc/apache2/httpd.conf or /etc/apache2/apache2.conf in order to associate the PHP mime type with the file extension. That wouldn’t work because I had also installed phpmyadmin which has an apache.conf file that already has an AddType directive. So, after some digging around, it turns out the module wasn’t even being loaded, even though that’s what you’d expect the package manager to handle when you tell it to install the module. Any how, to fix the problem, just create symbolic links to the php5.load and php5.conf files in the /etc/apache2/mods-enabled/ folder.

sudo ln -s /etc/apache2/mods-available/php5.load /etc/apache2/mods-enabled/php5.load
sudo ln -s /etc/apache2/mods-available/php5.conf /etc/apache2/mods-enabled/php5.conf
sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart

Update: Debian-based installs of Apache2 have some handy command line utils for managing the web server. So to enable a mod, which automates the above, do this instead:

sudo a2enmod php5

a2dismod is the command for disabling a mod. For sites, there is also a2ensite and a2dissite.

alias easy_install_upgrade_all='python -c "for dist in __import__('\''pkg_resources'\'').working_set: print dist.project_name" | while read package; do sudo easy_install -U "${package}" ; done'

Put that alias in your ~/.bash_aliases file, run exec bash, and you should be good to go (assuming your .bashrc file is setup to automatically load your .bash_aliases file). Note the use of escaped single-quotes around “pkg_resources”.

RSpec is the current black when it comes to testing. Seeing how it’s adopted by merb by default and I’m targetting merb for an old app I shelved because Rails just didn’t have the high performance yet to pull it off, I figured it would be the test method I should learn. It also helps that RSpec is just more readable than Test::Unit. Installation is more or less trivial and is covered succinctly in the RSpec documentation. Just remember to install RSpec as a plugin and not as a gem. Autotest will puke otherwise. You can also use the -x option if you want to install it as an svn external. (Another option would be piston another gem I need to look at.)

ruby script/plugin install http://rspec.rubyforge.org/svn/tags/CURRENT/rspec
ruby script/plugin install http://rspec.rubyforge.org/svn/tags/CURRENT/rspec_on_rails

Then you bootstrap the plugin which installs the generators and rake tasks.

ruby script/generate rspec
ruby script/generate rspec_model foo
rake db:migrate
rake spec

If all goes well, rspec should run and you should get a result similar to this:

.
Finished in 0.313 seconds
1 example, 0 failures

Now that RSpec is running properly, we want it to run automatically. That’s where ZenTest comes in. (The capitalization is intentional.)

sudo gem install ZenTest

ZenTest contains autotest. You start autotest from the root of your Rails application.

autotest

Autotest will then sit there continually checking your app folders for any file changes. When one is detected that requires RSpec to run, autotest will fire off the rake task to do so. Go ahead and edit ./app/models/foo.rb by adding a blank line and then save it. When you return to the terminal window you should see that the test ran and you got the same result as before.

There is a prettier and more informative alternative than the results provided in the terminal. RSpec can produce HTML output as well. Create a folder ./doc/spec/ for the output folder. Now open up ./spec/spec.opts in your editor and add the following lines.

--format 
html:doc/spec/report.html

This will cause an HTML report to be generated every time a test is run, in addition to the terminal output. The HTML report not only tells you what tests failed and passed but also where the failures occurred. The HTML format is much easier to navigate than the terminal output.

Mac OS X users have a notification program called Growl that autotest hooks into. On Windows there’s Snarl. For Linux, there’s libnotify. libnotify is not a standalone application like Growl or Snarl, but a library around which an application, or in this case, an applet must be written. There’s a handful of how-tos that walk you thru hooking autotest to libnotify, but the one I considered the best was this blog post, Gnome autotest Notifications. If you follow those instructions, you should get a working notifier, but I would recommend replacing his .autotest file with my .autotest file:

require 'rnotify'
require 'gtk2'
require 'launchy'

module Autotest::RNotify
  class Notification
    attr_accessor :verbose, :image_root, :tray_icon, :notification, 
                  :image_pass, :image_pending, :image_fail,
                  :image_file_pass, :image_file_pending, :image_file_fail,
                  :status_image_pass, :status_image_pending, :status_image_fail
    
    def initialize(timeout = 5000, 
                   image_root = "#{ENV['HOME']}/.autotest_images" , 
                   report_url = "doc/spec/report.html",
                   verbose = false)
      self.verbose = verbose
      self.image_root = image_root
      self.image_file_pass = "#{image_root}/pass.png"
      self.image_file_pending = "#{image_root}/pending.png"
      self.image_file_fail = "#{image_root}/fail.png"

      raise("#{image_file_pass} not found") unless File.exists?(image_file_pass)
      raise("#{image_file_pending} not found") unless File.exists?(image_file_pending)
      raise("#{image_file_fail} not found") unless File.exists?(image_file_fail)
      
      puts 'Autotest Hook: loading Notify' if verbose
      Notify.init('Autotest') || raise('Failed to initialize Notify')

      puts 'Autotest Hook: initializing tray icon' if verbose
      self.tray_icon = Gtk::StatusIcon.new
      tray_icon.pixbuf = Gdk::Pixbuf.new(image_file_pending,22,22)
      tray_icon.tooltip = 'RSpec Autotest'

      puts 'Autotest Hook: Creating Notifier' if verbose
      self.notification = Notify::Notification.new('X', nil, nil, tray_icon)

      notification.timeout = timeout

      puts 'Autotest Hook: Connecting mouse click event' if verbose
      tray_icon.signal_connect("activate") do
        Launchy::Browser.new.visit(report_url)
      end
      
      Thread.new { Gtk.main }
      sleep 1
      tray_icon.embedded? || raise('Failed to set up tray icon')
    end
    
    def notify(icon, tray, title, message)
      notification.update(title, message, nil)
      notification.pixbuf_icon = icon
      tray_icon.tooltip = "Last Result: #{message}"
      tray_icon.pixbuf = tray
      notification.show
    end
    
    def passed(title, message)
      self.image_pass ||= Gdk::Pixbuf.new(image_file_pass, 48, 48)
      self.status_image_pass ||= Gdk::Pixbuf.new(image_file_pass, 22, 22)
      notify(image_pass, status_image_pass, title, message)
    end
    
    def pending(title, message)
      self.image_pending ||= Gdk::Pixbuf.new(image_file_pending, 48, 48)
      self.status_image_pending ||= Gdk::Pixbuf.new(image_file_pending, 22, 22)
      notify(image_pending, status_image_pending, title, message)
    end
    
    def failed(title, message) 
      self.image_fail ||= Gdk::Pixbuf.new(image_file_fail, 48, 48)
      self.status_image_fail ||= Gdk::Pixbuf.new(image_file_fail, 22, 22)
      notify(image_fail, status_image_fail, title, message)
    end
    
    def quit
      puts 'Autotest Hook: Shutting Down...' if verbose
      #Notify.uninit
      Gtk.main_quit
    end
  end

  Autotest.add_hook :initialize do |at|
    @notify = Notification.new
  end

  Autotest.add_hook :ran_command do |at|
    results = at.results.last

    unless results.nil?
      output = results[/(\d+)\s+examples?,\s*(\d+)\s+failures?(,\s*(\d+)\s+pending)?/]
      if output
        failures = $~[2].to_i
        pending = $~[4].to_i
      end
      
      if failures > 0
        @notify.failed("Tests Failed", output)
      elsif pending > 0
        @notify.pending("Tests Pending", output)
      else
        unless at.tainted
          @notify.passed("All Tests Passed", output)
        else
          @notify.passed("Tests Passed", output)
        end
      end
    end
  end

  Autotest.add_hook :quit do |at|
    @notify.quit
  end
end

The improvements I made are to (a) forego using themeable icons and stick strictly with the Autotest Growl Fail/Pass Smilies (b) run a check to make sure the images exist otherwise raise an error, and © load the RSpec HTML report when you click the icon in the system tray. In order for the onclick event to work, you need to install the launchy gem.

sudo gem install launchy

After all that is up and running, you should have a fully functioning test environment that will automatically run (after starting autotest in a terminal) with a notification applet running in your system tray that you can click to load a well-formatted HTML report in your browser.

In order to create the guest user account, the easiest way is to use the Users and Groups application. This is not installed by default. You need to first install this via Synaptic/apt-get. The package to install is gnome-system-tools. It will install other complimentary administration utilities. Once you start Users and Groups it will be straight-forward, as to how to add a user. Just put in the username, real name and keep the “Desktop user” profile, set the password, and click OK. Everything else you can safely ignore.

The next thing to setup is the auto-login. gOS 2.0 uses Entrance as the display manager—worst misnomer ever by the way. In Linux, the display manager is the name of the graphical login. Why couldn’t they just call it the graphical login manager. Anyhow, Entrance does not have an auto-login setting (yet?). So to get that feature you need to install the Gnome display manager, gdm, again using Synaptic or apt-get. During the configuration phase of the installation it should prompt you which display manager you want to be used by default. Make sure to select gdm. Afterwards, just open the Login Window preferences and go to the Security tab. There you will find a checkbox to Enable Automatic Login. Choose the guest account as the user and that’s all there is to it.

Optionally, you can install the greenos-gdm-theme. This will make the login screen and OS have continuity. Once installed, you set the display manager theme via the Login Window preferences. Just select the “gos” theme and make sure the “Theme” setting is set to “Selected only.”

The last thing to do is to prevent Entrance from starting up. You might think to simply uninstall it. Don’t. The problem with that method is that the entrance package is a dependency of the entrance-theme-greenos package which is a dependency of the greenos-artwork package. Uninstalling Entrance, means uninstalling a good portion of the gOS theme art. So the workaround is to install the Boot-Up Manager, bum. After installing the Boot-Up Manager, start it up and simply uncheck “The enlightened login manager, entrance,” and you’re good to go.

After finishing all this, it might have been much easier just to use the same method I used originally for my first guest computer rather than install gdm. Something to try next time.

To automatically login the user and start the GUI, I added the following command to the guest’s /etc/rc.local file. NOTE: You have to be root to edit this file. This solution was posted on the DeLi Linux forum, but I’m sure it’s applicable to any Linux distro.

su - guest -c startx

To launch an application at startup, there are various ways. The first is to edit the user account’s ~/.xinitrc file. In the case of Firefox, you would change this section

# start some nice programs

exec icewm-session

to

# start some nice programs

firefox &
exec icewm-session

The application you want to start must come before the exec icewm-session command. However, I settled on using the method built into IceWM instead. Create a file ~/.icewm/startup. This file is executed by icewm-session. An example, using Firefox:

#!/bin/sh
firefox &

Don’t forget to set the startup file as executable.

chmod +x ~/.icewm/startup

I know there are tutorials and projects for creating an internet kiosk using Linux, but I really didn’t care to jump through all the hoops to lock down the machine since a) it would be used infrequently, b) it wasn’t going to be in public, and c) though the primary use will be for accessing the web, it may not be the only use. You never know. My guests may want to play some Minesweeper.

Open up a terminal (mrxvt) and enter the following commands. NOTE: If you are not using DeLi Linux, your particular installation of IceWM may differ, and as a result, file locations may differ.

cd ~/.icewm
mkdir themes
mkdir themes/goldiKwarc
mkdir themes/goldiKwarc/taskbar
cd themes/goldiKwarc/taskbar
ln -s /usr/share/icewm/themes/goldiKwarc/taskbar/icewm-alt.xpm icewm.xpm

From the start menu, select Logout…–>Restart Icewm. Once IceWM reloads, you should see Tux smiling back at you. If you want to use the start button from a different theme, just change the symbolic link command appropriately. If you use one your own, you can either link, copy, or move the file to this folder. This technique should work for any image in a theme as long as the relative location is the same. Of course if you change a lot of images, you may want to consider creating a new theme instead.

NOTE: start.xpm is another valid name.

The default GUI fonts are a combination of Helvetica and Courier. The default GUI fonts can be overridden, not surprisingly, by the currently selected theme. Those font settings can then be overridden by a prefoverride file. NOTE: If you are not using DeLi Linux, your particular installation of IceWM may differ, and as a result, file locations may differ.

cp /usr/share/icewm/preferences ~/.icewm/prefoverride

FYI the ~/.icewm folder contains user-specific settings for IceWM.

Open the file using one of the installed editors (vi, X File Write, Beaver Text Editor, or XElvis). Delete everything before line 753.

Let’s work through an example. On line 106 (previously line 858), you will find a setting for TitleFontName. See anything familiar with the value? It’s the same kind of string value used in the Font Selector.

Start Font Selector and set the fndry to “adobe”, fmly to “helvetica”, wght to “medium”, slant to “r”, and ptSz to “120”. If you happen to be using a theme that uses the default fonts then the font will match the font in the window title.

Let’s say you’d rather have a serif font instead of a sans serif font. Let’s also say that you’d rather make the font larger. So change fmly to “new century schoolbook” and ptSz to “140”. Does it look good?

Now that you’re happy with the font, let’s apply it to the GUI. Switch back to the text editor and change line 106 from:

# TitleFontName="-adobe-helvetica-medium-r-*-*-*-120-*-*-*-*-*-*-*"

to

TitleFontName="-adobe-new century schoolbook-medium-r-*-*-*-140-*-*-*-*-*-*-*"

Notice that the line is no longer commented out. Save the file.

To see the change, go to the Start menu and select Logout…–>Restart IceWM. You’ll have to click the arrow next to Logout in order to see the submenu. If all goes well, you’ll see the window title font change after IceWM reloads.

If you look through the rest of the file you’ll find many settings that you can override. Repeat the above steps to adjust any GUI font you don’t like. It’s fairly obvious which setting you will need to change by reading the setting’s name. To make things easier you can apply the same change by globally finding and replacing text. Just remember to uncomment any changed settings before restarting IceWM.

Last year, I had put VectorLinux 5.1 on there. I even managed to configure an ISA network card. DMAs, IRQs… boy, aren’t you glad plug-n-play was developed? Unfortunately, Mule developed an X Windows issue. I figured it was a good opportunity to upgrade to 5.8 and it would appear that they’ve improved the distro. Unfortunately, it simply was also more than Mule could handle despite being a lightweight distro.

I’ve since downgraded Mule to DeLi Linux. Since DeLi Linux is spec’d against a 486 with 16 MB of RAM, Mule has no problem handling the OS. It’s true. I’m quite impressed with the responsiveness, but that’s not surprising given the optimized nature of the distro. This lightness does come at a price though. Lots of useful utilities are missing. The one glaring example are the utilities to help customize IceWM. You are left to edit configuration files on your own. It really isn’t that big of an issue for me since Mule’s next role will be an internet access computer in the guest room. Once configured, I’m just going to put the computer in the room and forget about it. However, for those who will use it as a day to day machine will be quite annoyed with trying to get the UI to look just the way they want. For example, it’s not very obvious how to change the desktop wallpaper, and the included themes leave much to be desired if you’re used to something more flashy.

Given today’s prices for computer hardware, even used computer hardware. You’re much better off buying something better to run a more fully featured distro. However, if you have the hardware on hand and the intended application isn’t that taxing, you may want to consider resurrecting the computer using a lightweight distro.