DaveQB's Rambles

Well I found out the hard way tonight the short falls of java on Mandriva 2005 KDE 3.4 version. I had it installed but it wasn't the VM wasn't working in my browsers 9Konqueror, Firefox and Opera). I created the symlink Firefox needs, still no go. I found java needs to in your path for the VM to work so I got the working by adding to my ~/.bashrc script the java bin folder to my PATH with:

	PATH=$PATH:/usr/java/jre1.5/bin

I then found this didnt solve the problem. Why you ask ?? Well I was very much wondering the same thing. I decided to run java_vm from console and got the error message that JAVA_HOME and PLUGIN_HOME were not set. Never knowing I had to set them I googled to find most were setting them to the dir above the java bin, like so:

	export JAVA_HOME=/usr/java/jre1.5/
	export PLUGIN_HOME=/usr/java/jre1.5/

This finally got it working. Strange for a newly installed Distro to not have have Java working -----

Vectorlinux nicely prints to the screen info about who you are, and what commands you have at your disposal. This is nice but can halt programs that do non-interactive logins, like scp. So off I go finding where Vector does this and how to make the script test for interactivity before printing to the terminal. After a bit of googling I found this handy link. http://www.cs.sunysb.edu/documentation/bash/bashref.html#TOC62. So now to apply this info to Vector. I searched through and found:

• /etc/profile.d/vasm.sh

This file was responsible for printing that info to the terminal. So basicly I applied that if statement found on the link above around all the info in the vasm.sh file. Also, I pulled out the non-interactive part of the file and put it outside the now interactive executed section so it would be ran if it was an interactive or non-interactive login. Here's the files, now altered to work with scp.

• Link to my vasm.sh in pretty colours
• Plain text version

I use the great application called GKrellm. Its a system monitoring tool; it monitors CPU and case temp's, disk usage, network usage, memory and swap status and uptime to name a few. Well this morning I accidently found there is a GKrellmd package. A little probing find you can connect remotely to a GKrellmd with a GKrellm client. So I urpmi'd GKrellmd on my server and launched it with:

	gkrellmd -a  10.1.1.11 -m 1 -d

And then launched a seperate instance of GKrellm on my desktop with the command:

	gkrellm -s 10.1.1.1

And up she popped with all my servers information. Beut! Didn't have temps though. So I checked and didnt have lm_sensors package installed. So urpmi'd that and ran what it suggested "sensors-detect". It asked about scanning my system and found 2 sensors. One was my motherboard one and the other was a riva named chip. Must be the VGA. Thought I would say yes to installing a module for that as well and WHAMO! Whole system to a halt. There goes my 82 day uptime :( -----

Well I have dabbled in CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) before for little bits of sites I have built, but never gave it a full go.....until now. What an amazing piece of work CSS is. Makes laying out a site so much easier and updating is a breeze later on. I got it a little bother and asked a few guys in #css on freenode.net. Here's a few links I have gathered so far that I dont want to lose:

• http://positioniseverything.net/
• http://css.maxdesign.com.au/
• www.hotdesign.com/seybold/everything.html -- humous intro to css

I'll add more when I can recall them :) -----

Well I found the solution on #php on irc.freenode.net. substr($ret , -5) was returning html when being the last 5 char is should of returned .html. I did notice this, but having never used the substr function before I didnt think much of it. So it turns out I was returning html\n (\n is 1 char). So it needed the trim function applied: trim(substr($ret, -4);
Its just like Perls chop function, servers same purpose. There easy solution like I said. -----

Well I have been putting together a site using php has a front end to a shell script. Well it all done and works well accept when I tried to add a little validation and error checking. I wanted to make sure the shell script ran fine and returns a file name (teamnames.html). Well validating that has become a nightmare. Here's my problem: echo $ret; // prints VikingsVChiefs.html
$ext = substr($ret, -5);
echo $ext; // prints html
$name = pathinfo("/var/www/html/dbnfl/$ret");
echo $name['extension'], "\n"; // prints html
if ( $name['extension'] == "html" ) {
echo "String found to have html extension"; }
else { echo "string not found to have html"; } // prints "string not found to have html"
Can you see this strange dilema ?? I have tried several different ways with the syntax, yet always results the same. I will hopefully have the answer to this soon. -----

Well I have had the problem of slapt-get not working on some fresh installs of Vector that I do. I would re-install and it would work, for no apparent reason. Today I think I found the reason why. I think I uncommented too many sources in the slaptgetrc file. I have been using Australian mirrors as well as the default one. So this time I only uncommented 1 sources per section, that being the default one. This corrected the problem of slapt-get trying to install from a local source (file:///mnt/somewhere) that was never uncommented in the slaptgetrc [made troubleshooting very confusing]. -----