PenguinREPORT

Welcome back to the world. I hope your Memorial Day weekend was good. Mine was bit longer than anticipated, but we’re back with a vengeance and back on track with Penguin Shell.

I spent much of the weekend configuring Apache, PHP and MySQL after an old 40-gig hard drive failed on my machine at home. I have to say - it was a moment of panic to hear a hard drive make a “whirr, click, click” sound, especially knowing that all my development work was sitting, inaccessible, on that drive. This was, of course, the drive that my entire Linux system was on. I’ve been much better about backups than ever before, but had done the most recent backup two days prior to the failure. I missed much of a full day’s worth of modifications to the Lockergnome project. After shutting down the machine and letting it rest for a full night, I was able to fire it up and back all my critical data up to CD-ROM. Literally, at the moment the backup completed, the drive failed for good. Since I had another 40-gig drive in the machine with another OS that I’m no longer using at home, I was able to install, configure and restore with as minimal pain as can be expected.

I didn’t, however, spend the entire weekend at the computer. Lunch with family, baseball on TV, grilling hamburgers, and tinkering with a motorcycle that didn’t fare as well this winter as in the past took a lot of my time. I’ve yet to get the bike on the road despite the great weather, but am making progress daily in reviving it from seven months of inactivity. I expect to be tearing up the Iowa two-lanes sometime this week.

I also installed and configured PHP Nuke over the past several days. If you’re unfamiliar with this program, it’s an “out of the box” solution for community-oriented sites - blogs, news sites and the like. It’s really quite nice and couldn’t be easier to configure and maintain. I’m working through some fairly hardcore mods to give it a distinct look and feel, as well as to perform some functions that aren’t available in the stock configuration. All in all, if you’d like to join the blog revolution, have a Linux box and some time to set it up, PHP Nuke is a clear recommendation to manage and control such a site.

Today, we’re finishing up the XF86Config series - after fourteen installments. It’s the longest series we’ve run thus far in Penguin Shell. If you’d like to see coverage of any element of your Linux system - especially those elements we can spread out over a week or two and investigate in depth - please let me know. I’m always looking for your input and to help in any way I can with your Linux setup, configuration and use needs.

Have a great Monday.

Tony
Steidler-Dennison