A few weeks ago, I mentioned how I wanted to install a new distribution of Linux, called Sidux, on my home fileserver. See the post “Moving To Sidux, Part 2“. At that time the Sidux installation still didn’t work.

I’d found that I had to make space at the start of my 200Gb drive as Grub couldn’t see the boot information due to bios limitations. The boot info was beyond the bios limit of 170Gb.

Well, after moving the old Kanotix /home partition further up the drive to create space for two new partitions at the beginning, I met another problem to fix.

Booting my new Sidux installation, now at the start of the drive, failed again for a different reason. It turned out that the partition table of that drive was no longer in order.

The old home partion labelled hdb1 was now at the end of the drive, and had two other partition, hdb2 and hdb3 before it in the physical layout. Grub or something else in the boot process didn’t like that and Sidux refused to start.

I found the solution, thanks to advice at WebServerTalk.com, was to rewrite the partion table so that the partitions were listed in order from hdb1 to hdb3. By booting from the live Sidux CD (another advantage of Sidux), I could edit the partition table and I now have a fully functioning Sidux installation.

It only remained to ensure everything was OK with my old Kanotix boot, by editing it’s fstab to point it’s old /home to it’s new partition name of hdb3 .

I’ve been playing around with creating a small program that will allow me to create many thousands of new, original articles from a base of three variations of the same piece. I’ve had some thoughts on the design and started to develop something in Perl. I’ve got SQLite providing the database function to store my information.

The problem I’ve immediately run up against is the lack in Perl of a visual environment. At least in the initial stages of my program, I want to be able to cut and paste between my application and article directories on the web, in order to submit the articles. Perl just doesn’t provide the framework I need.

Happily, I’ve found an alternative in Lazarus and the Free Pascal compiler. Together they provide a free software alternative to Delphi, which is a visual, object oriented implementation of the Pascal language.

I’m in the middle of rationalising my web hosting arrangements. Over the past 3 or 4 years, I’ve ended up with paid hosting accounts with 5 different providers as well as two or three free accounts.

I have quite a number of different sites along with several domain names I haven’t yet created a site for. Even so, five hosting services is at least one too many.

The decision of which one to drop is pretty straightforward. There is a single affiliate site hosted with one of the providers and that is the only one with them. It is also the most expensive host, charging around $30 per month. Any additional sites cost $10pm each and only 3 MySQL databases are allowed. This is not competitive today.

The reason I haven’t left them before now is that until recently I had two affiliates, reducing my monthly charge to $10. Now I’m down to one affiliate and I find it hard to justify paying $20 per month for a single site. This hosting service has to go.

I was working last night on transferring one of my subscription sites to my own hosting, more on that in a moment.  Anyway, in the process I accidentally clicked on one of my own Adsense ads. It is so easy to do with the Dell ‘mousepads’ which are pressure sensitive. Moving the cursor around can be risky as it is so easy to press just a little harder and generate a click in error.

I mentioned a moment ago the subscription sites.  The news is worse than I realised. I checked two of the sites which use the same template, though on different subjects. It turns out that their html coding is really poor. For example, there are extra head and body tags in the page, along with over 50 other errors reported by theW3.org validator.

Buyer beware seems to apply here, for sure.

I moved the first two of my sites to my own Midphase hosting yesterday. These are the sites I mentioned that are intended to make money which have been so disappointing.

Here is the process I used for the first, more complicated one. This first site has a static front (index) page with a Wordpress blog in a subdirectory. Items on the front page link to categories or posts in the blog.

Firstly I upgraded the Wordpress installation on the subscription hosting to the current version, using Fantastico. I then created a domain placeholder on my destination, Midphase hosting, using CPanel. Still in Midphase, I created a new Wordpress installation as a framework for the blog.

Going back the the subscription hosting I disabled all of the Wordpress plugins and exported the Wordpress database to a local sql file, using phpMyAdmin. After editing the start and end of the sql file to match my new database name, I dropped all of the new Midphase Wordpress tables and imported the sql files containing the blog data.

It then just remained to ftp all of the site files to my new location, change the domain DNS addresses to point to my Midphase host and activate the plugins in my new Wordpress installation. After the DNS propagated, I was in business.

I’ve just been trying out a few programs on my Linux box, using Debian they are very easy to install (or remove).

First was Tipptrainer, a typing tutor to learn and practice touch typing. It seems OK if not meant to be fun. It will do the job, I’m sure.

Next was a fun arcade game, Circuslinux - a clown shoots into the air, bursting balloons. When he comes down you have to catch him on a seesaw so that he bounces up again. Good music and fun to play. The downside was that I had to change my graphics resolution, it didn’t like 1024×768.

And finally I installed Stopwatch to use as a timer to record my writing work. I’d have liked it to beep when it reached zero, but I guess that was not a design reuirement.

The Linux box I’m using by the way is my works laptop. I’ve installed Sidux on a 4Gb memory stick so that it runs without touching the internal hard disk. The disk is encrypted so that Linux can’t read it but that isn’t a problem.

Sidux was a breeze to install on the memory stick, it comes with a script that does it just fine. Following the  installation, I’ve had fun learning how to tweak it with the language pack for GB English and keyboard.

Why Sidux wouldn’t boot: after installing Sidux from the Sidux LiveCD to a new partion on my second, 200Gb disk, and rebooting, the machine halted with the message ‘Grub geom error’. It turned out to be a problem with the bios of my Compaq PC. I’d created the new partion at the end of the disk. However the bios reported that my hard disk size was only around 170Gb, rather than 200Gb and so the partion was not visible to the bios and couldn’t be booted.

So, taking a risk, I deleted the new partion and moved the existing partion (my Kanotix /home) up the disk to make the free space at the beginning rather than the end. By the way, this was a lengthy operation (using QParted) and took over 7 hours. Any interruption might have lost my data.

On creating two new partitions at the start of the disk, one for Sidux and one spare, I reinstalled at the start of the disk ,installed Sidux and rebooted and Sidux worked.

That was good news, but now I had another problem! Although the Sidux installation had detected my original Kanotix system, it failed to boot it correctly. Since Kanotix is still my main server system, I wanted to restore it as soon as possible. A Yahoo search turned up Super Grub Disk which I used to create a boot floppy and restore my boot into Kanotix on my primary disk.

(continued…)

Graham

This morning, I’m in the middle of recovering from making my home server PC unbootable, due to unforeseen issues.

I’ve been using the Kanotix distribution of Linux as the server operating system on this PC for a couple of years now. By using the excellent Debian updgrading/updating system, apt-get, I’ve been keeping it in line with Debian Testing branch. Kanotix was originally based on Debian Unstable. But when I installed it, I didn’t appreciate the difficulties and dangers keeping up with Unstable, given my limited knowledge of Linux at that point. So after a period when I didn’t update it at all, I decided to tie my Kanotix to Debian Testing and began updating on a weekly basis.

This has worked out well, giving me a stable and usable server platform. But as usual, I got a bit bored and wanted to try something new. Unfortunately, Kanotix has changed direction. After being moribund for a while it is now going to be based on Debian Ubuntu. This is not for me as it is too restrictive and almost like a proprietory system. Good to see that Dell is providing it on their new computers shortly though, at least they will be offering a version of Linux as an alternative to Microsoft products.

More later…

Graham