LINUX NEWS
http://www.Cramsession.com
November 28, 2002 - Issue #109TABLE OF CONTENTS
1) Sean’s Notes
2) Linux News
It'll Save You Money, Even If You Don't Use It
Quoth the Penguin, "Open Source"
The Top 5 Misconceptions About LindowsOS
Sun's Parts with $35Million3) Linux Resources
Speaking With A LISP
Desktop Linux Roundup
Using the Logical Volume Manager
FreeBSD Early Adopters Guide
Building A Mailbot in PHP4) App o’ the Week
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1) Sean’s Notes
Blogging seems all the craze these days. I suspect it has been so for a while, it’s just that I’m behind the times and am just catching up. Regardless, installing blogging software on your own machine is pretty simple, and combined with a cable modem or DSL, makes it easy for you to carve out your own space of blog-land. (Is “blog-land” even a word?)
Movable Type (MT) is a great piece of software upon which to run a blog. After the initial installation, you manage it completely from the web. It’s easy to use and customize, too. Installing it, though, can be a problem, judging by various sites that offer assistance with MT installation. This week, I’m going to guide you through the installation, and hopefully, steer clear of the pitfalls.
Fire up your browser, and jump on over to:
http://www.movabletype.org/download.shtml
Download the Full version, no libraries. Since we have full reign over our own system, we may as well install all the libraries centrally.
I downloaded it into /usr/local/src
tar -xzf MT-2.51.tar.gz
mkdir /var/www/html/blog
cp -r * /var/www/html/blog
RedHat throws all your web-related files into /var/www/html. By creating the “blog” subdirectory, the site will be accessible at:
http://my.site/blog/
(if you haven’t registered a domain, the IP address of your Linux box is fine.) If you want it to be the root directory of your site, then by all means delete the “blog” from the commands. If /var/www/html isn’t where your distribution places HTML files, then adjust as appropriate.
If you did check it out with your web browser, you should see a nice note that you can’t view the contents of the directory, along with a pointer to the installation instructions. You could follow those (which is essentially what I’m doing), but I’m hoping to steer you clear of the pitfalls, and let you know what it is you’re really doing.
First thing to do is to edit the mt.cfg file that’s in the directory. It’s a pretty simple format, just a tag and a value. The first, CGIPath, tells MT where all the CGI scripts go. (CGI is what lets you run code on the web server to generate dynamic web pages.) In my case, I’m using my test machine:
CGIPath http://www.linux/blog/
Next, MT needs to know where to store its data. Rather than use a SQL server, we’ll take the easy way out and use DBM files, a very simple but powerful way of storing data within files. Though the installation suggests “./db”, I’m going to put it in “/var/blog”. Put it wherever you want, just remember that directory for later! Just as a side note, the “blog” above doesn’t correspond to the “blog” below, I just happened to choose the same name. Users of the site will never know where you’re storing the data.
DataSource /var/blog
Now, take that directory and create it:
mkdir /var/blog
chown apache /var/blog
chmod 700 /var/blog
Here, the directory is created, and changed to be owned by the web server, and only readable by the web server (700 means “owner can do anything. Everyone else stay out!” Read up on octal file permissions at:
http://ertw.com/~sean/news/Jul-4-2002.html
May as well set permissions on the web directories so you can write to them:
cd /var/www/html/blog
chown -r apache .
chown -R root *.cgi extlib lib
Here, we’re letting the web user own the directories, but are explicitly taking away control of the binaries and the libraries.
All that remains is to tell the webserver that cgi files in the blog directory are to be executed instead of returned to the browser. You’ll know if you missed this step, because once you try to view your new blog, you’ll see a mess of perl code on your screen. Edit httpd.conf, it’s likely in /etc/httpd/conf
Add the following lines to the end, and restart your web service.
AddHandler cgi-script .cgi <directory /var/www/html/blog> options +execcgi </directory>
The first line says “anything ending in .cgi is to be executed as a CGI script”. The second line says “the following commands are valid only in the blog directory”. The third line turns on the execution of CGIs, since by default they are disabled. The last line closes off the directory tag above.
I’m going to hit:
http://www.linux/blog/mt-check.cgi
If all works out, I’ll get a page showing me what modules I’m missing. CPAN is what we’ll use to get those installed:
perl -MCPAN -e shell
If you’re prompted to configure, you can chance it with the defaults by selecting “no”, or say “yes” and configure it properly. I find the latter safer, simply accepting all the defaults, but picking a local mirror toward the end. You’ll be prompted to choose it by your continent and country.
From the CPAN prompt, I can install all the modules that
mt-check told me I was missing.
cpan> install HTML::Template … cpan> install Image::Size … cpan> install DB_File …
Using CPAN is so much easier than doing it the long way!
Hit that url again to make sure all your modules were built fine.
Last step is to run the script that builds the databases, again, through the web:
http://www.linux/mt/mt-load.cgi
If all goes well, you’ll see the message “All went well”. You should also note the message to delete mt-load.cgi. I’m never a fan of deleting these types of things outright, but I sure don’t want other people accessing it. File permissions to the rescue:
chmod 000 mt-load.cgi
000 ensures that nobody can run it without really going out of their way (and being root).
That’s it! The rest is all configuration.
http://www.linux/blog/mt.cgi
Log on with the username of “Melody”, and the password of “Nelson”. Go to “Edit your profile”, and change your username and password to something that you want, and can remember.
Then, head on over to “First Blog”, and “Blog Config”. Just make sure all the paths are correct. Feel free to change the name, since “First Blog” is quite boring.
From here, navigate the menus to add new entries, or change the
layout of the site. Just don’t forget to rebuild your site when it prompts you too.
Linux makes a great web platform. Combined with a great web server such as Apache, and some good content management software such as Movable Type, you can express yourself to the world, or just have a quiet place to write your thoughts.
Happy blogging.
Long live the Penguin,
Sean swalberg@cramsession.com
2) Linux News
It’ll Save You Money, Even If You Don’t Use It
Just the mention of your company going to Linux might be enough to get your Microsoft rep to drop their prices. While you’re probably better off giving Bill the heave-ho, it just goes to show that Linux is so good, you don’t even need to use it for it to help you.
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/nf/20021127/bs_nf/20 105
Quoth the Penguin, “Open Source”
Proving that a million monkeys sitting at a million keyboards eventually put something good out, the Cramsession ByteBack newsletter brings you this clever and inspiring poem.
http://newsletters.cramsession.com/Newsletters/NewsletterArchive/By teBack/november-26-2002byteback.html
The Top 5 Misconceptions About LindowsOS
I’ve heard a lot about LindowsOS in the past, not much of it good. But this article goes some way toward explaining some of the things said about this product. Turns out that not everything said is true (including having to run as root).
http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id”40
Sun’s Parts with $35Million
“Sun’s Terraspring purchase will provide the foundation for its 1 vision (architecture for data centers). Enterprises should start assessing architectures for policy-based computing services and design road maps to them.”
http://techupdate.zdnet.com/techupdate/stories/main/0,14179,2898638 ,00.html
3) Linux Resources
Speaking With A LISP
The Emacs editor can be extended with a language known as Lisp. Aside from Emacs, though, Lisp is a very powerful programming language. Using Emacs as a programming environment, uber-programmer Sanjay shows you the basics of Lisp.
http://infocenter.cramsession.com/techlibrary/gethtml.asp?ID45
Desktop Linux Roundup
Extremetech takes a look at many desktop Linux distributions, and gives them an overall ranking. No surprises with RedHat, Mandrake, and SuSE, but others like Lycoris and Lindows make this an interesting read.
http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,3973,647840,00.asp
Using the Logical Volume Manager
As you start to get a lot of disks, managing them into partitions and file systems becomes tedious. The logical volume manager gets around this by letting you build logical disks out of physical disks, and grow them on the fly.
http://www.linuxgazette.com/issue84/vinayak.html
FreeBSD Early Adopters Guide
Looking to get in on the bleeding edge of BSD? Look at this guide for instructions on using the developer preview of 5.0-RELEASE.
http://www.freebsd.org/releases/5.0R/DP2/early-adopter.html
Building A Mailbot in PHP
I’m continually surprised how far people are able to push the PHP language. It’s got to the point where PHP is its own command line shell scripting tool instead of just a web module! This article follows the development of a mailbot in PHP.
http://www.phpbuilder.com/columns/galloway20021105.php3
4) App o’ the Week
As someone with more than a passing interest in IP Telephony, this program caught my eye. Most protocols that phones use don’t play well with NAT, Cisco’s proprietary “Skinny” being one. This perl script claims to be able to proxy this odd-named protocol.
http://cvs.oisec.net/cgi-bin/cvsweb.cgi/skinny-proxy/
(C) 2002 BrainBuzz.com, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
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