Archive for October, 2010

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How to remove the joomla string in the URL of a joomla website

Sunday, October 31st, 2010

ou need to find your joomla installation directory for instance if joomla is installed in /home/hipo/public_html/joomla
You must go to to this directory and edit the configuration.php file.
In the joomla’s configuration.php you need to edit the variable $var_site:

The current variable in your joomla configuration will probably be something like:

var $live_site = 'http://www.yoursite.com/joomla';

var $live_site = 'http://www.yoursite.com/';

Also you might need to change change: var $ftp_root = 'public_html/joomla';
to
var $ftp_root = 'public_html/;

Hopefully now the joomla string will be removed from your website URL address.

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Posted in Linux, Various | No Comments »

Alternative way to kill X in Linux with Alt + Printscreen + K

Sunday, October 31st, 2010

I’ve recently realized that the CTRL + ALT + BACKSPACE keyboard combination is no longer working in Debian unstable.

This good old well known keyboard combination to restart X is not working with my xorg 7.5+8 under my Gnome 2.30 desktop
However thanksfully there is another combination to kill the X server if for instance if your Gnome desktop hangs.

If that happens simply press ALT + PRINTSCREEN + K this will kill your X and then reload the (Gnome Display manager) gdm.

Another suggestion I’ve red in the forums of a way to enable back CTRL+ALT+BACKSPACE is to put in either .bashrc or .xinitrc the following command

setxkbmap -option terminate:ctrl_alt_bksp

BTW It’s better that the above command is placed in ~/.xinitrc.

I’ve also red on some forums that in newer releases of Ubuntu. The CTRL+ALT+BACKSPACE can be enabled using a specific command, e.g. with:

dontzap -disable
 

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Posted in Linux | 1 Comment »

Fixing Disappeared intel net link 5100 wifi on Toshiba Satellite L300 1YA

Friday, October 29th, 2010

I've recently had to fix a Toshiba Satellite L300 1YA notebook , running the shitty Windows Vista operating system.
For some reason suddenly the Net Link 5100 Wi-FI Network Adapter of the laptop mysteriously disappeared.
The led indicating the device is enabled was blinking the driver showed properly installed in Windows -> System and everything.
Even though that the wireless network scanning in the notebook was not working.

In networking in System there were two lines showing up with excalammation mark "!".

To fix the mess it took me 3.5 hours. I tried many things first logical thing I tried was reinstalling the driver with the latest available from Intel's website. Anyways this doesn't helped so I was about to think about other solutions.
What made thinks even worse was that the Vista installed was in Chineese!, yes you red this correctly chineese. You cannot imagine what a hell it is to deal with Windows whose language pack was Chineese …

The Vista had installed also the Chineese antivirus program Rising which also provided the system with some weird firewall and this made the dealing with the problem even more complicated.

After many tries I finally completely removed the wireless driver on the system and reinstalled it with the latest version from Intel's website.
Thanksfully after a couple of reboots and going into save mode the Intel Net Link 5100 started working again by itself?!

Well you know how things goes with Windows, you never know what will happen next.

Maybe a lot of notebooks suffer the same weird issue with Wireless Wi-Fi adapter suddenly stopping to work.

So now you know the solution, remove the driver install it again, restart and it should be working again.
Hope this quick and dirty article will save somebody an hours of time to figure it out …

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Posted in Linux on Laptops, Windows | 1 Comment »

Configure HAN Wireless WI-FI Internet on Windows XP/ Vista / 7 and Linux (Wireless Internet in Arnhem Business School)

Thursday, October 28th, 2010

It’s so annoying. Everytime you need to configure your internet at HAN (Arnhem Business School) you have to go to the Computer Center and look for the university IT support to just install you a simple program.

For one or another reason this guys has decided to use a strange encryption protocol which is an add on over the normal Wireless Connection.
Thus to properly connect to the Internet with your Notebook running Microsoft Windows or Microsoft XP or probably Windows 7 you have to install a software called SecureW2

Since I believe many students at HAN / Arnhem Business School (ABS) had to reinstall their Windows or has to do some routine thing like reinstalling completely the Wireless Network drivers on their PCs.
Then you certainly need the SecureW2 program and then again you have to go to this Computer Center instead of being able to simply do it on your own.

Therefore I decided to share here the complete SecureW2 software they use here in Hogelschool van Arnhem en Nijmegen

You can download the Wireless Internet Configuration Software for Arnhem Business School (ABS) / HAN here
Above I share all the versions of the program I have for both Windows XP / Vista and 7.
However for those who want to download the SecureW2 HAN Wireless Internet Configuration program file by size please check here

The program is also coming with documentation and manual even 🙂
So after downloading the SecureW2 and going to HAN at school then you can configure the program on your own.

Apart from that you might also want to check my previous post where I have explained how to configure the Wireless Network to work with Anrhem Business School’s Internet on my Debian Linux

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Posted in Business Management, Everyday Life, Various, Windows | 1 Comment »

How to enable Avatars picture in PHPBB forum / Solution to “The avatar functionality is currently disabled”

Wednesday, October 27th, 2010

The phpBB forum I’ve recently started was not accepting the upload of avatars. In the User Control Panel after I’ve tried to upload an avatar I got this message:

The avatar functionality is currently disabled

Thus it seems that avatars are disabled by default in PHPBB 3.0.2-4 on Debian Linux.
To enable back the avatars and also enable the avatars upload function I had to do few certain things as you can read below in steps:

1. Create the avatars directory in the phpbb document root

debian:~# mkdir /usr/share/phpbb3/www/avatars/
debian:~# mkdir /usr/share/phpbb3/www/avatars/upload
debian:~# mkdir /usr/share/phpbb3/www/avatars/gallery

2. Set proper permissions to the avatars directory to be writtable by the Apache user

I decided to change the owner of the dir to www-data to achieve that.
debian:~# chown -R /usr/share/phpbb3/www/avatars

3. Login with admin user to phpbb and go to Admin Control Panel (ACP)

Admin Control Panel is located on the bottom of the page, so just click over it.

After you’re in the ACP
4. In the general tab click over Avatar Settings

E.g.
General -> Avatar Settings

5. Change Enable gallery avatars and Enable Avatar uploading and rise up a bit the maximum avatar file size

Set the below two to yes:

Enable Gallery Avatars = Yes
Enable Avatar Uploading = Yes

Here the default size of avatar I found to be very low it was set to: 6144 Bytes that’s only 6kb, so I changed the
Maximum avatar file size = 61440

6. Set the directories to store the avatars and the avatars gallery dir

This two you will have to set to be:

Avatar storage path = avatars/gallery
Avatars gallery path = avatars/upload

That’s should be all necessary to enable the avatars on your phpbb forum and also enable the avatars uploading.
Now just press the Submit button to approve the changes.
Also if you need to change the maximum avatar picture dimensions just configure that before you press the Submit button.

To test the avatars logoff from your admin account login with a regular user and go to:

User Control Panel (UCP) -> Edit Avatar -> Upload from your Machine

Press the choose button and select the avatar picture you would like to have as your avatar.
Last step is to press the Submit button.
Now the avatar image should appear, everytime you wrote a post on the forum 🙂

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Posted in Everyday Life, Linux, Various | 1 Comment »

How to restrict access to phpBB categories only to registered users

Tuesday, October 26th, 2010

1. Login with your phpbb administrator (admin) account

2. Go to Groups’ forum permission Permissions in Administration Control Panel
Administration Control Panel (ACP) -> Groups' forum permissions

3. In the left menu pane click Groups’ forum permissions
There you will see the text Link up usergroup (located in right of the Groups’ forum permissions just chosen.

4. Choose the Guests look up group from the drop down menu
Press submit there and then check the tick box reading All forums located a bit below the list with forum categories and topics.
Next you will have to press the Submit button.

5. Choose No Access for Role: to each and every forum category and threat

There you will se a list of all your forum categories and topics each and next to each of it you can assign permissions for the Guests user group (e.g. not registered users).

Make sure you have selected No Access for all the list.

As a last step to complete the procedure press the Apply all permissons button.

From now on only registered users will have access to your forum Topics and Categories.
Cheers! 🙂

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Posted in Everyday Life, Various | No Comments »

Remove print, pdf and Email to a friends tiny icons from your Joomla Posts

Monday, October 25th, 2010

sI’ve blogged in my previous blog that this days I’m mostly learning joomla, because I need it to fix a website.
One of the things in the Joomla website that needed adjusting to make the website look a bit more professional was the removing of the default 3 small icons supposed to be useful reading Email to a friend , Print webpage and Email to a friend

Removing the 3 icons and the links seemed to be very easy to remove them. I had to partake the following steps:

1. Go to Joomla’s administration page and login

2. Go to Article Manager

Content -> Article Manager

3. Move through all the articles and click each of the articles

There you have to click further to Parameters and make sure that for:
PDF Icon , Print Icon and E-mail Icon is set to Hide

After completing this press the Save button located in the upper right corner of the webpage.
Note that by default this three paramers value will be set to Global and if the 3 icons are not set to a Hide in Global settings, the icons will continue appearing until the Hide for the three ones is selected.

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Posted in Everyday Life, Linux, Various | 4 Comments »

Making your Joomla URLs Google friendly with sh404SEF plugin (Very simple Joomla link SEO)

Sunday, October 24th, 2010

For 2 days already I’m playing with Joomla and learning this CMS basic usage.
Along with that I’ve been assigned a task to optimize a Joomla based restaurant website to play well with Search Engines.

After some time researching in Google I’ve found a number of Joomla extensions which seemed very hepful, however I still haven’t tested all of them and I’m still more or less in a process of gettint to know the joomla framework and it’s capabilities.

Anyways I’ve succeeded in installing the sh404SEF extension which I’ve found as a recommended and the most easiest one available out there which is able to rewrite the joomla site URL links to be attractive and more meaningful for Search Engine (BOTs) Crawlers.

Nevertheless it appears that the sh404SEF plugin is no more available in the official website for free and it’s no longer GPL licensed.
So practicly it has almost disappeared from the net, it took me quite an effort to actually find a link to a downloadable version of the plugin. Finally I found this blog containing a download link to the file
Because obviously the sh404SEF joomla extensions seems to be slowly disappear from the net I decided to make a mirror you can download the Joomla com_sh404SEF-15.1.0.20_Beta_build_237 plugin for free here

Installing the plugin is very straight forward.

Open the Joomla plugin Installer

You need to go to after logging in to joomla admin to:

Extensions -> Plugin Manager

Then you should install the plugin with the URL installer.

Immediately after installation read the Install and configuration instructions, on the README page to appear you will also notice a link which will lead you directly to the sh404SEF configuration panel from there you can tune many things related to Search Engine Optimization and there you can enable the url links rewritting.

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Posted in SEO | 2 Comments »

os-prober a new Debian package able to add you all different Operating Systems to Grub boot menu

Saturday, October 23rd, 2010

Yesterday I’ve blogged about my Problem with Widowns Vista disappearing from my grub boot and it’s solution.
Today while was doing aptitude update && aptitude upgrade I’ve just noticed the os-prober package as a recommended one.
After I’ve reviewed the info about this package with apt-cache show I’ve realized that the os-prober package has already become part of Debian installer and is responsible for probinal for all non-Linux (non-Debian) operating systems and properly adding them to the boot loader. That way os-prober assures that your other non-Linux operating systems will be available for boot along with the Debian as a grub boot option. In other words the os-prober package does in automated way exactly what I’ve blogged about just yesterday. I wish I knew it earlier to prevent all the manual interventions and tests to once again include my Vista to grub boot menu.

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Posted in Linux, Linux and FreeBSD Desktop | No Comments »

Windows Vista disappeared from my grub boot options after update to grub2 (How to revert back Windows Vista to Grub boot menu)

Friday, October 22nd, 2010

(How to revert back Windows Vista to Grub boot menu)A couple of weeks before I’ve noticed that my Windows Vista diasappeared from my boot options in Grub
Actually the Windows Vista disappared from the grub OS boot screen, right after the grub package was updated to grub2.

It appears in the Debian Testing/Unstable (Squeeze / Sid) and apparently the newer releases of Debian after the stable one, the grub package is being substituted with the transitional package Grub2 .

In grub2 there are plenty of improvements over the good old grub, anyways. As with most advancements the grub2 I find a bit more complicated and the way for editing the boot options operating system I find more harder to achieve than with the grub generation 1.

Anyways the comparison between grub and grub2 is a very long discussion which can be followed on many forums online, the main goal of this article is to show you the few simple steps I took to include my Windows Vista as a boot option once again in my grub 2 Operationg Systems selection menu.

1. Use fdist to determine the exact partition where your Windows Vista is located

hipo@debian:/etc/grub.d$ /sbin/fdisk -l

Disk /dev/sda: 160.0 GB, 160041885696 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 19457 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x2d92834c

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 1 721 5786624 27 Unknown
Partition 1 does not end on cylinder boundary.
/dev/sda2 * 721 9839 73237024 7 HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sda3 9839 19457 77263200 5 Extended
/dev/sda5 9839 12474 21167968+ 83 Linux
/dev/sda6 12474 16407 31593208+ 83 Linux
/dev/sda7 16407 16650 1950448+ 82 Linux swap / Solaris
/dev/sda8 16650 19457 22551448+ 83 Linux
hipo@noah:/etc/grub.d$

2. Create an empty file in /etc/grub.d/42_Windows
If 42_ number is already existing or a script with a higher number is already present in /etc/grub.d you will need to assign a number that doesn’t coincide with another script’s head number.

3. Open the empty file and edit it with your favourite text editorI personally use vim 🙂
debian:~# vim /etc/grub.d/42_Windows

As in my case /dev/sda2 is the partition where my Windows Vista is installed I had to set root='(hd0,2)’ in the script placed in 42_Windows that you can see below:

#!/bin/sh -e
echo "Adding Windows" >&2
cat << EOF
menuentry "Windows Vista" {
set root='(hd0,2)'
chainloader +1
}
EOF

Note! here that in the above code (hd2,0) should be set according to your partition as it shows in fdisk.
4. Last you need to execute the update-grub cmd

debian:~# update-grub

All left is to Restart your Linux and your Windows Vista should show in the boot menu OS options.

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Posted in Linux, Linux and FreeBSD Desktop | No Comments »

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