When booting a regular Linux system, it just mounts some partition with a nice file system (such as ext4) on your HDD on / read/write and there you go. When booting from a CD-ROM, it’s not that simple. The CD-ROM file system, ISO 9660, does not support the file names and attributes that a Linux system normally needs. And the CD-ROM is read only. There are ways to work around these issues.

Goal To build a minimal Debian based Linux system with a fully functional bash shell, TCP/IP networking with DHCP client and apt setup to be able to install any package from the Debian repositories. The resulting system will use about 157 MB disk space and consume less than 10 MB RAM. This is now implemented in Bachata Linux. Prerequisites A Debian based Linux system to work from (e.g. Ubuntu desktop) with the debootstrap and extlinux packages installed.

By default, the MySQL data is placed in /var/lib/mysql, which is a reasonable default. However, sometimes you want to place it somewhere else, such as on an other file system. Using a symlink doesn’t seem to work, so you have follow this procedure. To move the MySQL data directory from /var/lib to /mnt/mydata, run these commands as root: apt-get install mysql-server service mysql stop mv /var/lib/mysql /mnt/mydata/ replace /var/lib/mysql with /mnt/mydata/mysql in /etc/passwd – mysql /etc/mysql/my.

Using a ZTE Blade Android phone connected with USB is a bit tricky with Ubuntu 11.10. First you need to apply the patch in this bug, after doing that you should get USB storage to work. After doing that, it is also possible to get development and debugging to work over USB. Create a group androiddev (addgroup --system androiddev), and add yourself to it (gpasswd -a yourUsername androiddev). Then create a file /etc/udev/rules.

Ubuntu has mechanism to log user activity such as used documents. This is used to facilitate searching, but can also be intrusive to your privacy. Here is a way to disable this logging without breaking Unity or any other part of the system, execute these commands in a terminal: sudo mv /etc/xdg/autostart/zeitgeist-datahub.desktop /etc/xdg/autostart/zeitgeist-datahub.desktop-inactive rm ~/.local/share/recently-used.xbel mkdir ~/.local/share/recently-used.xbel rm -rf ~/.local/share/zeitgeist then log out and log in again.

To backup data from a non-smart SonyEricsson mobile phone (such as W890i) in Linux, use the gammu utility. Install gammu, it is available as a package in the standard repositories for Debian and Ubuntu, just install the gammu package. Create a ~/.gammurc file with the following content:> > [gammu] > port = /dev/ttyACM0 > connection = at Connect your mobile phone to the computer with the USB cable and select Phone mode

The developers of PHP has, in their infinite wisdom, decided that the default session timeout should be 24 minutes (1440 seconds). This means that if you have a MediaWiki wiki and are editing a single page for half an hour and then click the save button, you are logged out and all your changes are lost. I just learned this the hard way. Fortunately, you can change this with the session.

The new Ubuntu release 11.04 Natty contains the new Unity desktop environment which is quite controversal. I have tried it for a while and I think it is neat but too buggy and immature. However, it is easy to revert to the old Gnome 2 desktop environment and have things working almost as in 10.10. First do a normal distribution upgrade to 11.04, then go to System Settings -> Login Screen and select Ubuntu Classic as default session and reboot.

I just brought an Sveon SNT1020 WiFi USB adapter. It works very well with Ubuntu Linux 10.10, just connect it to an USB 2 port and you can start using it with NetworkManager right away, no drivers or setup necessary. You should possibly disable any built-in WiFi adapters first though. It cost €35.

When you know which type of web application you are to develop, it’s time to have a look at some possible choices. I have tried to categorize some modern and popular web application frameworks in Java. Simple server driven MVC page based This category contains the traditional frameworks used for developing web applications with purely server driven application logic. They are based on complete HTML pages and uses the Model-View-Controller design pattern.