Submitted by drew on

Here is some information I've collected for setting up and using a Bitnami Virtual Appliance. Specifically, I was using a couple of appliances to test a plugin in different versions of Redmine.

 
For more details on some of these items: see http://bitnami.org/faq/virtual_machines
 
 
This page assumes you are using the appliance for development only, and as such, disregards a bunch of security rules. If you're providing access for production, you'll need to follow proper security guidelines.
 
 
So you don't have to keep typing sudo (and possibly a password), enter this command:
sudo su
The rest of the commands on this page assume you are doing them in sudo.
 
bitnami items are located at
/opt/bitnami
If you want to move bitnami's home folder, edit the home folder setting for bitnami in
nano /etc/passwd

Location

Redmine items are located at (other apps are similar):
/opt/bitnami/apps/redmine
The /conf folder has apache configuration settings.
The /htdocs folder has the actual application (i.e. this is the real redmine root)
 
To restart Apache (or other services), run one of the commands below.
Restarting Apache also restarts the Ruby application.
/opt/bitnami/ctlscript.sh (start|stop|restart|status)

/opt/bitnami/ctlscript.sh (start|stop|restart|status) mysql

/opt/bitnami/ctlscript.sh (start|stop|restart|status) apache
or 
/opt/bitnami/apache2/bin/apachectl restart
 
To copy files from the host to the VM perform this command:
mv /etc/init/ssh.conf.back /etc/init/ssh.conf

start ssh
Then you can use FileZilla to copy the files.
  1. Add a new site (File > Site Manager > New Site)
  2. Enter the IP address of the VM (192.168.56.101 or similar)
  3. Leave the port blank.
  4. Set the protocol to SFTP.
  5. Set user to 'bitnami' and password to 'bitnami'
  6. Click Connect.
  7. This should take you to the bitnami user's home folder, but you'll probably want to change to /opt/bitnami.
You can edit files from FileZilla by right-clicking and select View/Edit. This will open the file in an editor or associated program.
 
To connect, set the network adapter to 'host only' and then point your browser (on the host) the address below.
The exact address may be different if you have more than one VM running. If so, run ifconfig to find the one that's similar.
192.168.56.101
 
To enable phpmyadmin, find the file at
/opt/bitnami/apps/phpmyadmin/conf/phpmyadmin.conf
Change the line 'Allow from 127.0.0.1' to
Allow from 192.168.56.1
or 'Allow from all' or whatever you need.
Change the long wiki address for the phpMyAdmin link in /opt/bitnami/apache2/htdocs/index.html.en to "phpmyadmin/"
Restart Apache.
Go to http://192.168.56.101/ (refresh may be needed) and then click on the big "Access phpMyAdmin" button.
Login to phpmyadmin with user 'root', pass 'bitnami'.
 
To enable running rake manually, you'll have to set proper mysql permissions for whatever user you want to run rake from.
Without any changes, you'll get an error like
Access denied for user 'bitnami'@'localhost' to database 'redmine_development'
In phpmyadmin, change the host for the bitnami user to 'Any host' (or %) and set other privileges you need.
In /opt/bitnami/apps/redmine/htdocs/config/database, change the development database to 'bitnami_redmine'
 
To get better logging/debugging and use the development environment...
In /opt/bitnami/apps/redmine/conf/redmine.conf, change/add lines to match below
PassengerFriendlyErrorPages on

PassengerLogLevel 3

RailsEnv development
Restart Apache.
 

 

Selecting PHP command line version on HostGator shared host

Submitted by drew on

This took me a while to find, so I'm saving it somewhere I can find it again.

The easy way to select the PHP version used for web applications is to use the CPanel configuration tool. However, that doesn't work if you're using SSH and need PHP on the command line. Also, on HostGator, you can't create a symlink outside of your directory (such as to the global php).

You can find out what version you have with

$ php --version

If that's not the version you want, try a specific version like this (php55 is 5.5, etc):

Book Scanning Process

Submitted by drew on

 

Just to document this for next time. For reference, my books are 8 x 10.75 inches and other dimension below work for this. For approximately 100 pages, It takes me about 45 minutes to scan, an hour to crop and rotate, and 30 minutes to organize and generate the PDF.

Fixing features for hotfolder

Submitted by drew on

Here is some documentation about the process I used to solve some issues with hotfolder and the features module. I was doing this partly through the web interface and partly through a console, so this is a reconstruction of what I remember and the console log. 

 

I was getting the following error message when I tried to check hotfolder watches (see https://www.drupal.org/node/2453659):

Notice: Undefined property: stdClass::$field_watch_config_scheme

 

GIMP for Kids

Submitted by drew on

 

My daughter likes to draw on the computer. I don't remember exactly how it started, but she draws in GIMP using my Genius pen tablet, on my secondary monitor. I used to have Linux running in a VirtualBox with GIMP running on my second monitor for her, but VB doesn't completely work in Windows 10 yet. A while back I tried running GIMP on one of my Raspberry Pi's but it was just too sluggish to be useful, frustratingly slow for a (then) 3-year-old. It runs much better on a Raspberry Pi 2. It still lags if she goes crazy with a big brush, but it works.

Die Fly: Designing a better fly swatter

Submitted by drew on

I was looking through some of my old stuff for something and ran across this gem. If you need to put together a quick flyswatter, try this one I designed for a class in college (the famous Rube Goldberg project).

Here are a few excerpts from the attached PDF. If this doesn't convince you to build one (perhaps with several improvements as noted in the document), I don't know what will.