the corner office

About

This page contains notes I've written about setting up my Acer Aspire 5630 laptop to dual-boot Windows and Ubuntu. I keep adding to it as I run into odd things.

The notes are complicated by how I've got my XP partition installed. The C: drive is the default version installed with the laptop, but I've converted the d: drive to an ext3 partition and a Linux swap partition. When I'm in Windows XP, I run a small Ubuntu server under VMWare, and that server mounts the Linux disk partition and allows me to access it via a Samba share. This small server also runs my mysql, tomcat, cvs and apache servers. So basically, these notes deal with both generic Ubuntu-on-an-Acer issues, as well as odd tweaks that I need to make to keep my machine useful regardless of the OS I'm booting into.

Installing VMWare

I downloaded and tried to install VMWare server. First problem after untarring and running, was an error compiling the vmware modules. The error message eludes me. I read on a few sites that you need to download the vmware-any-any patch, which resolves the issue.

Next problem, trying to actually compile the modules. I got:

gcc: error trying to exec 'cc1plus': execvp: No such file or directory

Fix by installing GCC's C++ compiler. apt-get install g++ should do the trick (I'm getting lazy these days and using Synaptic.

CVS server

I always install CVS under the control of xinetd. Both needed to be installed. This link has the details.

Installing MySQL

I keep my MySQL data files on my main 'docs' partition so that it's easier for both my Linux workstation as well as my vmware Linux server under XP to get to it. It's easier for my setup, but to keep things happy on both my Linux vmware server and Linux workstation, I find it easiest to run mysql under my own user account (not wise for production...), and keep debian-sys-maint passwords in sync.

The best way to make sure that the server is working OK, is to keep a separate terminal window open, and run sudo tail -f /var/log/daemon.long. All errors get dumped to this log file.

Modify two variables in /etc/mysql/my.cnf (the original values are commented out):

# (to run as a different user)
# user     = mysql
user       = colin

# (to point to a different data directory)
#datadir   = /var/lib/mysql
datadir    = /home/colin/docs/data/mysql

By default, my user account doesn't have permissions to certain directories. The following sorts that out:

chown -R colin /var/log/mysql
chown -R colin /var/run/mysqld

This gives my user account permissions to write to the mysql log files (as in transaction log files, as best I can see), and the process lock file.

Something else that needs fixing, is the debian-sys-maint user's password. This user is a debian/ubuntu created user which is used to actually invoke various admin commands (like starting and stopping). The configuration is stored in /etc/mysql/debian.cnf. I change the password in this file to the same one that my VMWare Linux's debian-sys-maint user uses.

If you were just migrating the mysql data directory, and not trying to keep it in sync, you could simply update the password for the debian-sys-maint user in the actual db, using:

set password for 'debian-sys-maint'@'localhost' = password('mynewpassword');

from within a MySQL client.

Schumacher 'Clean' font

Others like Terminus and the free Proggy fonts are close runners-up, but I like the Schumacher Clean (usually just called Clean) monospaced font the most. It's installed by default but not visible. See this blog entry for details.