Island Linux Bits and Bytes of Technology

Over the past four months I have installed and configured twelve Dell Inspiron mini 10 netbooks with Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Koala) Netbook Remix. The netbooks are connected via USB cellular modems from Telus. During the process of ordering and configuring the cellular modems I received three different modems:

• Sierra Wireless USB 598
• Sierra Wireless USB 306
• Huawei E182E

Overall I managed to get all three USB cellular modems working with Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Koala) Netbook Remix. I ran into a few technical issues that I overcame and have had great success with all three cellular modems.

First you will need to install the following packages that Boxee needs to run, launch a terminal and run the following command:

To install Boxee on Ubuntu 9.10 first download Boxee from here (32-bit) or here (64-bit).

UTF-8 is hell. I have run into problems with UTF-8 before (see Migrating MySQL to UTF-8 encoding).

I moved a site that was displaying fine from an old Apache server to a new Apache2 server and quickly identified that the Apache2 server was displaying odd characters.

The site is running a PHP application with a MySQL backend. The MySQL database is using latin1_swedish_ci character encoding. The old site was displaying correctly. Both the new and old site are using the same database.

So what was going on?

Configuring Exim to use Gmail as the outgoing SMTP server is simple. This HOWTO will walk you through installing, configuring and routing email thru Gmail for exim.

The first step is to install exim4. Launch terminal and:

Run the following command to configure exim4:

Set the following:

General type of mail configuration: mail sent by smarthost; no local mail 
System mail name: (default)

The Sierra Wireless USB 598 currently offered through Telus *almost* works on Ubuntu 9.04 out of the box. A Windows or Mac box is needed to install the "Watcher" program that allows for the automatic online configuration of the Sierra Wireless USB 598. Aside from the requirement of Windows/Mac the card was immediately picked up and ready to go.

I was running into an issue with a vserver where the disk space usage was at 23% but I was getting a 'No space left on device' error message. I run vserver with 12 virtual servers and none of the other servers exhibited the same behavior.

Recently I came into a situation where a former employee had used a gateway marshaling concept and created multiple directories with the same file names (eg. www/admin/index.php. www/admin_v2/index.php). Debugging the code became problematic due to long filenames when using __FILE__. The long file paths were polluting the debug output and making it difficult to read.

I wrote a little function to return the file path based on a root directory specification. For instance if the script filename (aka __FILE__) is '/really/long/and/hard/to/read/path/www/index.php' the function will return 'www/index.php'.

This is useful for debugging calls (I use PEAR::Log) when using techniques such as:

I ran into an problem with sound on a Dell Inspiron 518 workstation running Ubuntu 8.04. I had paused Amarok and then viewed a Flash video on youtube. When I went to play Amarok again Amarok stalled and hung there. I had to kill the amarok process to shut it down. The syslog gave up:

When updating a MySQL database table to use UTF-8 I came across an error:

Initial research indicates that the maximum key size in MySQL is 1000 bytes. Given that latin1 uses one (1) byte per character and UTF-8 uses three (3) bytes per character some indexes will exceed the 1000 byte limit. This accounts for the generated error when converting tables with large or compound indexes from latin1 to UTF8 encoding.

According to the MySQL bug tracker this issue has yet to be resolved. Currently the only solution is to limit indexing on UTF-8 encoded tables or use latin1 instead. Not the best of choices to say the least.

While developing a content management system (CMS) using default MySQL settings an issue came to light in regards to UTF-8 encoding. Clients were sending in documents in Microsoft Word format that were encoded with UTF-8. When the data was copied from the document and pasted into the CMS WYSIWYG editor strange characters would be displayed after saving the document.

A second issue was identified where exported MySQL tables that contained UTF-8 encoded characters were being not being read correctly by Debian. Note that I am using an old installation of Debian (fully updated of course) that was rolled out before widespread adoption of UTF-8. Newer installations may already have UTF-8 enabled by default.

The goals of this HOWTO are as follows:

1. set newly created tables in MySQL to use UTF-8 encoding
2. convert existing MySQL tables to UTF-8
3. set default environment (command line) encoding to use UTF-8