http://www.scottklarr.com/topic/115/linux-unix-cheat-sheets---the-ultimate-collection/

After years of using slackware through it's various stages, I came to a point where it wasn't meeting my needs anymore. I bought a refurb ThinkPad T-30 with a p6 1.8G/.5GB RAM. Output is handled by the ATI Radeon 7500/16MB driving a 1400x1050 LCD. For a console junkie like me, this is heady stuff.

I booted the Elyssa beta I picked up from a buddy at work. I'd driven his machine for a little bit, and I liked the way the UI just... it just worked. I use XP-Pro.sp2 every day, and I use slackware/afterstep everyday on the aforementioned hardware. Practicing my workflow in this new UI presented no surprises. There was a decent selection of software off the bat, and I'd heard that ubuntu had a decent set of packages.

Why do I need a new distro for my laptop? Because I want things to just work. Because I want to focus on the things that make money - webdevelopment and sysadminning. I want a unified system to take care of getting this laptop connected to the rest of the world. I shouldn't have to dig around for obscure apps to string together to get simple things done. Because this is the best hardware I've ever had to do whatever I want with, and I want eyecandy and multimedia without any gymnastical scripts. Additionally, this needs to happen without interfering with my beloved window manager AfterStep, my trusty sidekick elvis and my secret weopon, bash. Don't get me wrong, I owe my allegiance to Slackware and forever until I die any distro I have an opinion about will be compared against it. But Dr. V had to make a decision, and he chose what's best for his distro. Unfortunately, at this point in my computing career it's a choice that leaves me on the outside. It's a good excuse to learn about this whole deb/ubu/gnome/sysv/grub phenomenon anyways. So after rsyncing a bunch of config files over the fileserver, I issued shutdown -r now for the last time on Slackware 12.0. I popped the iso in and took some notes. What follows is the mostly unedited notes I took as I imbibed in Lemon Hart and limeade while installing LinuxMint v5 Beta vx.x. Observations from retrospect will be denoted by C style comments

lcd is awesome. found mouse. connected itself via ethernet.
found my windows domain. was able to clickopen .txt files with gedit. Saved to desktop.

actual time: 6/7/2008 20:00PDT displayed: 6/8/2008 03:45

start > preferences > appearance > prefs > [unable to select any desktop effects] /*kernel did not load the improved radeon driver with gl*/

sound and video > pulseadio > [nothing]

internet > firefox > (chronixradio.com > playlist.pls) > play with default > Music Happened! very impressed with how good the video looks. dragging window or going back to window mode disables video though. /*maybe because the radeon's gl isn't enabled?*/

thinkpad buttons: volume up/down, but the mute button does not unmute. stop/restart mp3 stream player, still mute. /*very typical for the thinkpads. It's worked before, it'll work again*/

lets disable eth0 and enable eth1
administration > network tools > eth0 stats works
whois works
> configure [error: interface does not exist]

opened terminal. VERY extensive module list! much more than I had installed on slack. Some were features I don't use: parport, irda. bluetooth was loaded. radeondriver (administration > video settings showed that my monitor was at 50hz and 1400x1050, but no bitdepth??) was installed. No orinoco or hermes modules.

saving a file to ~/Desktop/ does NOT create an icon on the desktop. Is there a refresh function? Can I automate this check? Or will I need to learn to have seperate workspaces for the gui and the cli? that actually makes sense... break up coding versus my pim

clicked on desktop icon in bar... help menu not found

clicked on network icon in tasktrayish thingy. was able to locate my wifi, but was not able to authenticate when cutnpaste 128b WEPkey from firefox.

wlan0 as an interface? why?

ssh worked to local fileserver

netstat -atpn does not show mysqld or httpd, and what is gvfsd-smb-bro !?!?!? is that the gnome FS I saw something about on their site? port 127:139 is connected to 127:54591 what is that?

default vi is vim. elvis not installed, but it offered to install it for me. svn was offered. mysqld was offered. httpd was not.

smb shares show up as desktop icons. i think it did this since boot, but I just noticed. nice touch, that's what I wanted gnome for.

kyeboard shortcuts utility: nice touch! set "launch media player" to ctl-f8: worked. Set "run terminal" to shift+t: worked. THIS IS A KILLER APP. THIS MAKES ME HAPPY!!!

virutual terms 1-5 showed user mint already logged in. The term size seemed to be very small, but it filled the screen making each char large. I'd rather have a smaller font and more characters.. ls is colored, thank you. I find myself impressed.

Interesting environmental var: RUNNING_UNDER_GDM=yes

keyboard shortcuts: ctl-c/ctl-v work AND SO DOES *NIX mouse select!!!!! OMG!!! Another KILLER APP!!! > gedit seems to be the default editor. Ideally, this will be tweaked to launch elvis in a term when non-binary files are selected.

Overall, I am impressed. More features are working out of the box than I bothered to get configged under slack. My biggest concern is the wifi connectivity, but that needs more testing and this is a hotmount environment. There's no way I can work with metacity. I need virtual desktops, window control and wharf.

My mind was made up, I committed the box to an installation...

First, I need bugtracking software. I was originally trying to commit myself to making sure I had my codey notebookwith me at all times... but I've been doing it that way for years and it hasn't gotten me very far. I need an indexed system to track all the stuff I want to fix and help me stay focused on my roadmap. And if it has a timer, so I can see how much time I'm spending on certain projects or types of projects.

And I work with several ticketing systems, so I'm not at all intimidated by them. I looked at the Dreamhost wiki to see what other people are using... the packages were all familiar, but there aren't any that are auto-installed. Mantis of course strikes my fancy. Clean and lean but still robust and intuitive. Software written by people who depend on it is a beautiful thing. And I found some great instructions explaining exactly how to integrate mantis and subversion. Happiness ensues!

I'll actually be able to get some work done in a timely manner with a decent toolset. Now I just need to find more time in the day to do all the coding I want to do. And I need to figure out how to post faster. Sometimes it seems like such a hassle. Why won't they just integrate SEO into the core?

Version 1.0 of The Adventures of BrainyCat is now in production. Violating every rule of what blogs look like, it looks like what I like to see on my screen.

I've added many features. Let's see... post via email, post to bookmarking sites, rewrote the rendering inside the loop, new colorscheme.

I could not have done this without subversion. It's been a little challenging at times to get my head around it's way of doing things, but I've certainly gotten to a point where I feel comfortable navigating the repo as well as my workspace. I'd been having tremendous difficulty with trying to undo changes. While reading up on tags I found the directions for undoing changes. Oops.

If I wanted to start the svn configuration over from scratch, here's what I'd do:

1. install wordpress and all the plugins and themes to the dev site
2. create repo as normal
3. import the dev site into the rep, skipping the local configuration files
4. svn mkdir path/to/tags/version-0.1
5. cd path/to/dev/docroot
6. svn copy ./ path/to/tags/version-0.1
7. cd /path/to/prod/docroot
8. svn switch path/to/tags/version-0.1
9. login as admin to prod site and activate plugins, setup options, etc
10. test instalation.

Big things happening over on the dev site. I started the day with a total of 30 checkins to svn, and I ended the day with 114. I've got the sidebar setup, most of the bookmarking done and the 90% of the stylesheet done.

I still need to make sure the bookmarks are integrated, and that's probably going to require digging into the trunk to be able to run url_encode(the_permalink)). I may be able to skate if some kind soul has posted some docs. I need to update all the drilldown pages to reflect the new classes I installed in the style.  I'm going to let the header slide until the next release, because CSS positioning and I don't get along very well. The footer will be done in this release.

I really need to generate some scripts that will sync every table except options from the live site to the dev site.

And I need to remember to remove the static configuration file from svn before I update the live site.

I'd like to say I'm a lot more comfortable with svn now... but not really. I needed to undo some changes I'd checked in, and I had a lot of trouble trying to revert. I'll read up on that tomorrow. All in all, I only had to dig out the books once.

I've been messing around with subversion lately. I can't really say I've made great strides. I've been able to import the website into the repo. But I had a heck of a time trying to get files back out of it. It seems that if you import files, they aren't automatically added as a local workspace. In fact, I'm not even sure that svn thinks of workspaces the way I'm used to from the days I cut my teeth with perforce. I somehow got around that issue with the svn switch command, but not after I created immense problems for myself by failing to properly declare the path for the src, creating several trees that are just all wrong.

I guess I'm expecting SVN to act like p4. I was expecting to be able to copy the entire hierarchy from the depo, but only checkout the specific files I want to edit. It seems that SVN wants you to checkout to get a copy, but then it doesn't care how many open working copies there are in the wild. I hope, anyway.

Another feature that I find myself wishing I knew how to implement is the ability to map different parts of the repo to my workspace. I may just need to find a new way to work. I was expecting to be able to create a branch but map it into the trunk while working on it, then merge the branch back to the trunk after getting it stabilized. Ideally, I'd like to NOT have to change where the files live on my workstation.

Another issue I didn't think through is that the dev site is running off the trunk. But I generated a branch for my WordPress theme. So none of the updates are showing up on the dev site. Two possible solutions present themselves immediately: Find a way to map the branch into the workspace, or do the development against the trunk. That's the way I've done things before, without involving SCM, and I don't want to keep making the same mistakes. However, for the most part WP is modular enough that nearly everything I'm doing would be in it's own node in the hierarchy, so it becomes feasible if not advisable to work in the trunk.

Remember the switch command? Yeah, I broke something with that. I was trying to figure out why I couldn't branch from the dev site. It made no sense at the time. I had /dev.site/FILES and was able to import them. I was able to goto /live.site/ and do svn update and that worked fine, voila! www.brainycat.com is up and running. But in the /dev.site/, I couldn't do ANY svn operations. Remember, I had tonsilitis, a fever, no sleep, no food for many, many, many hours prior to trying to teach myself this software by implementing it. So I deleted the files in that dir, then tried to do an svn update. But I got the tree all wrong. I tried to delete the local files and try again, working under the idea that SVN doesn't care what I have locally. Nope, not able to try a new update. So I dig around in the book for a while and I find that switch option. It worked; but now it takes forever to do any sort of updates to the repo. I'm afraid I somehow crossrefererenced everything to each other. I'm seriously contemplating blowing the entire config and starting over.

But first I'm going to eat now that I can.

Which is only part of the reason this is so funny. The rest of the reason is that this is soooo totally me... "It was working fine until you broke it? >click<" hehehe.

Shamelessly embedded from the fine mind at xkcd.com

It's monday, and I'm back at work. Training isn't so bad, except for the glacial pace. This is the first chance I've had to see the site on IE. It looks better on firefox, though it remains to be seen if that's a function of display settings. All the features seem to work ok, except for the known bugs. Hopefully I'll have the production site up and running while I wait for my wife to get off work, then I can start beating this site into shape.

TODO:

1. Get www up and running
2. install some plugins? Need to find an expert list of the must-have plugins.
3. Create my own theme.
4. Install gallery and gallery plugins. Upload pics.
5. Start working on some real projects.

I am posting this on the a.dev.brainycat.com site I got running. In order to do development on wordpress without fear of breaking something useful, I had to change the user that some of the files were hosted under, which broke the live site. That's ok. I also had to backup the db from the live site and copy it to a new db that I setup. Some of the dev work will include new tables and such, so I don't want to jeapordize the live db.

I also had a little bit of an issue with the database. Dreamhost's installer configures a random string in the /wp-config.php:$table_prefix variable. When I went through the installer, I pointed the a.dev installation at the same database, but none of the data came up. Bummer. A quick peek with phpMyAdmin and the problem was obvious. I configured the dev site with the same table prefix, and my site came up without a hitch. Damn I'm good!  I'm debating how often I need to sync the two dbs. I need to think through the logic, and if I'd be creating more problems than save time. I need to develop an offsite backup system, as well. I had another issue with passwords; when I installed to the dev site wordpress pointed me to the login and admin pword generation site. I could not get logged in, so I just reset the pword via phpMyAdmin and life was grand.

Now I really need to get on board the subversion bus and get this site into a repo, so I can push the live site.  I'll probably have some time tomorrow at work to go over the SVN commands. Firstly, I need to find the url svn url ;).

I'm really excited about this. I was recently shown what one can do with google's tracking utilities. I'll have to setup YAGA (Yet Another Google Account) and get one of the keys and whatnot.

With all these new pwords, I'm going to look for a spreadsheet app that runs under linux. M$ compatibility is nice, but everything I'd need to import I can export from M$ as a CSV.

Things are moving along nicely. At this rate, I should be able to work on some real projects within a couple of weeks. Let's see how long it takes to beat wordpress into shape.

TODO items:

1. find spreadsheet app for linux
2. determine SVN URL
3. import dev site to repo, publish to production site
4. offsite db backup

Dreamhosts info

Using subversion for web development

Turtle Book