Archive for the ‘Upgrading’ Category

Upgrade to Wordpress 2.8.{1,3}

Saturday, July 18th, 2009

Today I upgraded wordpress again,

All I did was upgrade wordpress via emerge (this happens automaticly when running emerge -uND world ;) ), run webapp-config -U -h blog.leipie.com -u apache -g apache -s apache wordpress 2.8.1, run CONFIG_PROTECT="/var/www/blog.leipie.com/htdocs//" etc-update and execute http://blog.leipie.com/wp-admin/upgrade.php in my browser. Et voila, it was done.
I first made a backup off my mysql data just to be sure. using tar to backup my wordpress db in /var/lib/mysql ;)

Edit: Did the same for 2.8.3 today, but this has overwritten wp-config.php :o Luckily I keep a backup…

Tags: , , , , , ,
Posted in Upgrading, maintance, server install, wordpress | No Comments »

New Microcode CPU

Thursday, March 5th, 2009

A couple of days ago,

I decided to try updating the microcode of my Intel CPU. You need to do this each time you boot your computer, because it gets lost again when powering down your system.  On the Gentoo Wiki an easy How-to can be found. For updating the microcode you need to compile in microcode support in the kernel and and do “emerge -av microcode-ctl” after this you need to add the daemon to the startup scripts and voila your microcode gets update each time the OS starts. Compiling microcode support as module allows the script to unload it, when it is finished.

The microcode that is provided by the installed package is not the latest. The latest version can be found on download site of intel and needs to placed in the /etc/microcode.dat.

I didn’t notice any difference yet, but it might give a warm felling inside, to know that it’s up to date :P

I am only still pondering if I need to manually run the script again when resuming from hibernation.

Tags: , , ,
Posted in My Laptop, Upgrading | No Comments »

Upgrade to Wordpress 2.7.1

Monday, March 2nd, 2009

Today I finally upgraded from wordpress 2.6.5.

I just love Gentoo, for doing stuff like this. Before you start you must backup, your database and save all files that were not standard, like wp-config.php! After you have done this, it is as easy as “emerge -u wordpress” and install the new version into the webserver with “webapp-config -U -h blog.leipie.com wordpress 2.7.1“.

The only thing left is to copy back wp.config.php and run “http://blog.leipie.com/wp-admin/upgrade.php”

Wonderful!

Tags: , , ,
Posted in Upgrading, maintance, photos, svn, wordpress | No Comments »

Patching TuxOnIce into the kernel

Tuesday, February 24th, 2009

TuxOnIce is next,

I always used hibernation when using Windows, so I wanted it on Gentoo too. I decided to use TuxOnIce because the main suspend-to-disk functionality already present in the kernel tree has a lot less room for customisation.

Installing it seems pretty easy. Just take the vanilla kernel sources and apply the patch provided by TuxOnIce. It is well maintained, so there are patches for all the release of the kernel. Patching the 2.6.27.12 kernel was as easy as downloading the patch and patching the kernel sources accourding to the manual and set the newly available settings using “make menuconfig”. After this build the new kernel and installed it.

After this you need to install the script package they also provide and create space to put the RAM image in. This includes the hibernation script, but also a script for cleaning up after resuming. It invalidates the RAM image after resuming, so it is not accidentally reused when booting another time.

I wanted to hibernate to a dedicated file using the filewriter, but after numerous attempt this failed. The hibernation script kept complaining that the image, where it needed to write to, was not consistent. I wanted to hibernate to a file, because in this way I am not dependent on how much swap space is used or present. I don’t actually use swap for now. The 2GB RAM is currently more then enough.

So I finally choose to hibernate to a swapfile that was not actualy used as swap space. This is essentially a dedicated file for hibernation. I use the following the following “script” to hibernate:
swapon /TuxOnIce.swap; hibernate; swapoff /TuxOnIce.swap
This makes sure enough swap space will always be present when hibernation is started. It is almost like just a dedicated file, but if other swap space is present that will be used first. And the third statement is actually executed when hibernation is finished and the resume already done, precisely when we don’t need the extra swap space anymore.

I am still pondering if I want to add an UI to the hibernation and resume process. The UI is also provided via a seperate download. It seems to make de hibernating and resuming slower, but does enable to cancel hibernation or resuming and show a progress bar. For now I just use TuxOnIce without an UI.

Tags: , , , , , ,
Posted in My Laptop, Upgrading, maintance | No Comments »

Installing Gentoo

Wednesday, February 18th, 2009

To continue last post,

After upgrading the drive of my laptop I wanted to install Linux on it. Because I am already familiar with Gentoo I choose to install this distribution. And it is quite easy to keep up to date, but more important it is very easy to update to a new version. I know it is a lot of work to install Gentoo! But hey you do learn a lot about the workings of Linux and the kernel. ;)

Installing of Gentoo is best done with the Live CD they provide on there website. It provides a complete Linux environment from which you can install/manage/repair you system. They give you the option to install Gentoo really manually from the shell and have the latest portage tree installed right away or use their (GUI or shell) installer which copies part of the system installed on the live CD to the disk drive.

I installed Gentoo manually, because your install will be quite up-to-date and you do not have to update the complete system again once you have it running on its own. Their manual is very helpful and quite easy to use. With Gentoo you can choose with patch set use use for the kernel, I choose to use the vanilla kernel 2.6.27.12, because I heard that the patches of the Gentoo developers aren’t always up to standard… And the this is a newer kernel :D The sources can easily be downloaded via emerge the install system of Gentoo. And did “cd /usr/src/linux” and “make menuconfig”. The result was hours of reading and deciding how to set up the kernel…

The kernel compiled with a warning for which I applied the following patch and it seems to be running smoothly:
— arch/x86/kernel/head_32.S.orig 2008-10-14 17:04:39.000000000 -0500
 +++ arch/x86/kernel/head_32.S 2008-10-14 17:03:12.000000000 -0500
 @@ -600,6 +600,7 @@

.section .cpuinit.data,”wa”
 .align 4
 +__REFDATA
 ENTRY(initial_code)
.long i386_start_kernel

Once you are done, the system is completely bare. So after this I decided to install KDE. I tried Xfce2 also present on the Live CD before, but it was not mature enough for me. Because with Gentoo everything is build from the sources it took me a wooping 5 hours to build. :o This with the kdeenablefinal USE key enable, which should make compiling faster by using enormous amounts of ram.

When it was done I still needed to find out how to get it running. I tried running xorgconfig, but X kept complaining it could not find a window port. After some trial and error I figured out I needed to load the intel-agp and i915 modules, because I forgot to build them directly into the kernel. After this the X would happily start. And I had a GUI for the first time on my system!

The only thing they don’t tell in the manual is that you can only have 4 primary partitions in your MBR. So I needed to fiddle around a bit with partitions when I wanted to add some more partitions afterwards. But for this I found a very handy tutorial. But it is not for the faint hearted, because it involves deleting and recreating partitions with data on them :P

To be continued once again

Tags: , , , , , , ,
Posted in My Laptop, Upgrading, maintance | No Comments »

Upgrading my Dell Latitude D400

Monday, February 16th, 2009

Hey there,

A couple of weeks ago I decided to order a new PATA hard disk drive for my laptop, a Dell Latitude D400. I have been wanting to upgrade my 40 GB drive for a while now, since I noticed it was getting quite slow. I already upgraded the memory from 1GB to the maximum allowed 2GB and really noticed the difference, probably due not using any swap anymore.

The prices of HDDs have been dropping, so I figured that I could get a decent one for under 80E. My priorities were power consumption, price and size. In that order. After some browsing on tweakers.net, I found that I could buy a 160 GB disk for under 65E of Hitachi. I compared it with some other drives and found out that it had better power consumption than its bigger brother and drives from other brands. Amazingly the line of drive included a similar but 200 GB drive that consumed more power then the rest of the complete line, according to the specs . So I choose the slightly smaller one.

The specs and advertising also promised a quiet drive, but this only partly true. The spinning is indeed very quiet, but the seeking of the head is really noticeable. I didn’t notice any difference in battery consumption so far. This means it is not really worse then my old, much smaller drive ;) The new battery I already installed, gives me between 3 and 4 hours of battery time. Time will tell, if it has become worse or better…

So now it is installed, I was hoping be able to install more then Windows XP only.

Posted in My Laptop, Upgrading, maintance | No Comments »