Fixing hibernation problem after upgrading Wubi-installed Ubuntu to a real partition

Wubi is truly wonderful but has its gotchas. After upgrading to a real partition using lvpm, the hibernation still fails on me, it keeps saying:

PM: Cannot find swap device, try swapon -a.

during the hibernating process.
It turns out the upgrade didn't get the swap UUID right in

/etc/initramfs-tools/conf.d/resume

So here are the steps to fix it (Thanks to this thread):

• Change the UUID in /etc/initramfs-tools/conf.d/resume to the swap. (Find the UUID in /etc/fstab.)
• sudo update-initramfs -u
• Reboot

That's it, at least for my Lenovo Thinkpad T61/Ubuntu 9.04.

Read more >> Options >>

Testimonial: importing from wordpress to blogger

This worked:

http://yichao.zhang.googlepages.com/wordpress2blogger.py

This didn’t:

http://wordpress2blogger.appspot.com/

Hello World, again

I decided to switch from http://jiangyan.wordpress.com due to some issues I have with wordpress.com, one of them being that they charge 10 bucks a year for a custom domain for the blog, which is free with blogger.com.

Well, I cannot blame them for charging money. After all, the electricity and servers aren’t free. wordpress.com has a truly amazing system but apparently Google has more ways to earn revenue.

Building a personal site harnessing the (free) power of the cloud

If you are like me and

• do not want to pay for web hosting;
• the server at your lab/department/company doesn’t have software good or new enough (due to administrative and maintenance reasons) to host a decent modern PHP/Python/Perl CMS/Weblog/Whatever platform;
• do not have to a database accessible to any usable web server you have access to;
• do not have a public IP;
• think plain HTML suck too much to represent yourself as a computer geek;
• hate the limitations (No Javascript, No CSS tweaking, etc) of most commercial personal site/blog providers;
• …

Then this might help.

Google has been offering its cloud platform Google App Engine for a while and I haven’t imaged to use it as a personal site host until recently. A personal site doesn’t care whether it is superior in its resource provisioning and availability and we just want to have it for free.

Here is how to set it up.

1. Go to appspot.com and register. Then create an application.
2. Download the SDK and start programming or just use an existing CMS application such as app-engine-site-creator (open source, from Google)
3. Upload the source code to App Engine and you are good to go!

Moreover, you can

1. spend 10 bucks a year to buy a domain name if you want;
2. use Google Apps Standard Edition, a free service, to do the mapping from your domain name to your site at appspot.com.

So now, what freedom have you got?

• The ability to put Javascript, Flash based content on your site.
• Nice administrator console and full control over the database. (Or the BigTable if you will)
• Full control over HTML, CSS and anything as long as you have a little Python and Django programming skills.
• No programming experience? No problem! The app-engine-site-creator is just as easy to use as Google Sites. You create pages using the built-in page editor and store them in the database.

Want to make your site more social? Try FriendConnect. Now that you have the source level full control over your site, adding gadgets are just a piece of cake.

Why not let Google’s warehouse computers work for the rest of us (for free)?

mediawiki on ubuntu

I shouldn't have used the mediawiki package from ubuntu's repository. My initial thought was that since I wasn't that eager to taste all the newest features of mediawiki, I'd better use the package management system of the OS and avoid all the hassles of manual upgrading.

However... after I upgarded from ubuntu 8.04 (hardy) to 8.10 (intrepid), there were still errors like the following shown.
1146: Table 'wikidb.mw_protected_titles' doesn't exist (localhost)

Apparently the database wasn't updated with the system upgrade, it turns out that the ubuntu package didn't provide me the AdminSettings.php (not even an AdminSettings.sample) file for updating database. So I had to add it by myself and provided it with database admin password and then run
php update.php
under {mediawiki_root}/maintainence manually.

Hope this helps.

ViewVC on Ubuntu

Couldn't find a manual for viewvc on Ubuntu, which has a very simple configuration procedure.

After installation with aptitude,

1. add this line to apache configuration: i.e. a separate file under /etc/apache2/conf.d/
   ScriptAlias /viewvc /usr/lib/cgi-bin/viewvc.cgi


2. modify/etc/viewvc/viewvc.conf
   root_parents = /path/to/dir/which/contains/svn/roots : svn
   
   
   
   1. To enable code highlight, also install highlight and set: use_highlight = 1
   
   
   2. By default there is a line cvs_roots = cvs: /home/cvsroot. Comment it out otherwise there is a "cvs" directory in your web interface which links to nothing.
   
   
   
   

And. you are done!