Periodic Ramblings

We are all here on earth to help others; what on earth the others are here for I don’t know.
W. H. Auden

I stumbled across the site http://alternativeto.net/ today.

If you have ever wondered what type of alternatives to commercial software existed, this is the site for you.  They have a number of popular commercial pieces of software and list possible alternative/cheaper solutions that you could use in place.

I have an Asus EEEPC 100h that I am running Ubuntu 8.04 on.  One of the problems that I was experiencing, was that even though I had loaded the proper drivers for the touchpad, and could disable the tap-click through the configuration utility, it would be re-enabled each time the computer would be awoken or X restarted.  Since I hate tap-click with a passion, I was looking for a permanent solution to the issue.

What I found was that it was a simple addition to the InputDevice section of the xorg.conf file.  Here is what my InputDevice section now looks like.

Section “InputDevice”
Identifier    ”Configured Mouse”
Driver        ”synaptics”
Option        ”SHMConfig” “on”
Option        ”MaxTapTime” “0″
EndSection

The setting that took care of the tap-click was MaxTapTime set equal to 0, effectively disabling the option.

This is more of a reminder for myself, but if others find this useful, here it is.

I do some Drupal design work on the side and wanted to keep a local copy of the website on a machine at home to test new modules and updates to the core Drupal site.  To accomplish this, here is my configuration.

Operating System/Web

Ubuntu 8.04

XAMPP

Drupal  6

Duplicating Drupal

1. Create a backup of the site html/php.  I did a tar from my root directory of the website directory.  In the case of my provider (Dreamhost), the following command accomplished this:

mkdir data

cd data

tar -cvf sitename.tar ../sitename

gzip sitename.tar

2. Copy this down to your local machine and extract into the htdocs directory under your XAMPP installation.  For me, I use scp to copy the file down to my home directory and then extract..

cd /opt/lampp/htdocs

tar -zxvf /home/tom/sitename.tar.gz

3. Create a mysql database.  You can do this through the phpmyadmin link from the XAMPP homepage.

4. From your hosting provider, use their Mysql administrative interface, in my case it was phpmyadmin, to create an export of your Drupal database, making sure to save it in sql format.

5. Go to your local phpmyadmin and import the file you created in step #4 into your new database.

6. You now need to update the settings.php file to reflect your new database.  This file is found under /opt/lampp/htdocs/sitename/sites/default/settings.php.  Search for the line that starts with $db_url and change the database host machine to localhost and change the username to root with no password, unless you have changed this in your local copy of Mysql.

7. You can now surf to http://localhost/sitename and have a local copy of your Drupal site to test with.