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Linux Mint 19 Tara

A Pipe and a Keyboard Posted on June 11, 2018 by RichardJune 11, 2018

It’s been over 200 days since this site was updated.  I think that’s more an indicator if the reliability of Linux than anything else.

Last Friday week I downloaded Mint 19 Cinnamon Beta.  It hadn’t been officially announced but the ISOs were up on the server so I downloaded a copy.

Initially I thought of testing it in a VirtualBox but then decided I would grab some space on my hard disk and do a triple boot (Windows, Mint 18.3 and Mint 19).  I expected some minor problems, considering this was an early Beta, but there were none.

The first thing I noticed was the artwork.  There is a lot more of it!  But then I started messing around with it and found quite a few differences.  Some little niggly faults have been ironed out, Google Earth runs without any tweaks (I tend to use GE as a benchmark as it is usually quite problematic) and there were some additions.  Also I got the distinct impression that 19 is a lot faster than its predecessor, but not having any benchmark tests I don’t have any figures on that.

Possibly the most noticeable addition is Timeshift.  I would describe this as a cross between Windows Restore and Backup.  It takes a copy of everything on its list, whether that is the root software, the Home partition or whatever you fancy and does this on a predetermined regularity.

Frankly I was so impressed with 19 that I decided that it was more than good enough to become my primary OS.  This did lead to some problems as my test partition I had created was considerably smaller that the old working one so I decided to do a ton of resizing and moving of partitions.  (I wrote a light-hearted account of that process on my other site).   Apart from the moving and resizing I also created a small partition specifically for Timeshift, to keep the backup files is a separate area in case of disaster.

So far I cannot find a single fault with 19.

I’m a happy camper.

Posted in Linux | 2 Replies

Google Earth on Linux Mint 18.3

A Pipe and a Keyboard Posted on November 14, 2017 by RichardDecember 6, 2017

Out of curiosity I downloaded Linux Mint 18.3 (Beta) today and installed it in a virtual machine.

Again, curiosity got the better of me and I installed Google Earth using just Software Manager.

Naturally I expected the same old problems with Panoramio images, but no – it worked “out of the box”!  No more special scripts to load libraries or anything like that.  It’s fully functional.

Wonders will never cease?

UPDATE:

Wonders did cease.

When I did the full install (as distinct from using a virtual machine) GE failed again.  It locked on the initial screen showing the top bar, the menu and little else.

I eventually found the culprit –

Using Synaptic, remove the file xserver-xorg-video-intel

GE now works fully and properly.

Posted in Linux | 14 Replies

Rebuilding a WordPress site from nothing

A Pipe and a Keyboard Posted on September 19, 2017 by RichardSeptember 19, 2017

Some weeks ago I took on a project.

The project was to rebuild a major blog with next to nothing to start with.  The blog had been running for years and had an enormous following.  The author had been diagnosed with cancer some years ago but had continued her writings.  Last December she decided to discontinue the site, as her health was seriously deteriorated at that stage.  She erased the site.  Not long after, she expressed a sincere regret that the site was gone, and it was one of her dying wishes that somehow the site be restored.  Last August, she died without seeing that wish fulfilled.

I assumed there were some backups lying around and offered to restore the site to its former glory.  Unfortunately my assumption was wrong.  I contacted the company which had hosted the site.  Sorry!  We don’t keep backups that long.  So the call went out to see if anyone had miraculously got a backup of their own.

The first to respond was the blogger’s husband who was as anxious to restore the site as his wife had been. He announced that there were backups on the author’s PC.  I duly received 1,419 files (one per post) to find that they were all in MHT format.  MHT contains all the information for an individual page including HTML, JS, CSS and images.  However, MHT is not a universally recognised format so putting them on-line would only work in Internet Explorer (or in some other browsers with a specific add-on installed).  I had to find a way of extracting them, each into its component parts.

After some searching, I came across MHT2HTM which happily extracts the required contents and works on Linux.  I installed it and ran it.  It worked perfectly.

So I now had 1,419 folders, each containing everything required to reconstruct the posts.  However, files in folders – 59,337 files weighing 834Mb – are not very efficient as an archive.  They are bulky in the extreme and aren’t searchable and can’t be listed by anything other than folder name.  The answer was to extract the information from each folder, to move the image files to a central point and to populate a database with the correct information.

I set about writing a programme (in PHP).  The programme was simple enough in concept – it had to cycle through each folder, reading the HTML file and extracting al the required information to place in the database.  This meant stripping all the HTML off the file leaving just two parts – the post content and the comments.  These two were added so that the comments became part of the post.  That was moved to the database along with other information which had been extracted such as the author (there had been quite a few contributors to the site), the title, the name (slightly different to the title as far as the database is concerned) and the date of posting.

In the meantime I had taken over the domain name and had set up a server with a WordPress site.  I uploaded the database I had created and the first generation of the archive was live.

Also in the meantime I had received a few (!) more files from others who had had the foresight to backup some of the original.

One batch of 1,462 files was also in MHT format.  I ran that through MHT2HTM and I now had 1,462 folders.  Unfortunately the two archives had been saved using slightly different parameters so I couldn’t compare the two directly.  It would have to be done automatically.

I took my home-grown PHP setup and modified the code.  It now had to make sure that the record didn’t exist already from the first run.  This wasn’t quite so simple as because of the different parameters, there were some variations in post titles.  I had to generate a unique key for each post (which meant running the first batch again) and compare keys.  The key was simple enough – just strip all non-alpha-numeric characters from the title and replace spaces with dashes.

Next I had received some more copies of the site.  A couple had used WGET to download the site and a couple had used HTTrack..  These of course gave me a load of files all with different layouts and small but important differences in the HTML coding.

Once again I rewrote my PHP programme and updated the database.  I was now on a third and fourth generation of the site, each time adding a few more missing posts.

I had been dipping through the WayBack machine which had also sporadically taken copies of the site.  Then I discovered wayback-machine-downloader.  I downloaded and installed it and did a test run.  It seemed to do the job so I did a live run.  About eighteen hours later it finished.

Naturally, the downloader had dumped all its results into a series of folders with yet another layout.  This time I tried a different approach – I used “locate” to find the index files and piped the result into a file.  I discovered that if I created an array from that file using “explode” and “/” that the required files were to be found in all elements with a count of 12.  This made the job easier.  Once again, I used a modified version of the PHP programme to generate database entries.

I think I have gone as far as I can.  There are still some small tweaks to be made to the site, including a few duplicate posts that somehow crept in.  I still have to find some lost images as well, and maybe sort out additions to the various categories.

The result of all this effort can be found here:

The Anna Raccoon Archive.

 

Posted in Blogging, Linux, Tech stuff | 2 Replies

Bad interpreter error

A Pipe and a Keyboard Posted on October 28, 2016 by RichardNovember 26, 2016

I use shell scripts for a few jobs.

Recently I rebuilt a laptop and installed a few scripts from a working machine.  The other day I went to run one of the scripts from a command line and got the following:

/bin/bash^M: bad interpreter: No such file or directory

Now the new machine had an identical setup to the old and the script I was trying to run had the right permissions(and of course ran perfectly on the old machine), so the problem had to lie with the formatting of the script file ( and the ^M was a bit of a hint too?).  Somehow the file transfer had corrupted the script file and trying to edit it didn't fix it.

A simple fix. 

I used the following:

sed -i -e 's/\r$//' myfile.sh

The file then ran perfectly.

 

Posted in Linux, Tech stuff | 1 Reply

Install Google Earth with photos on Linux Mint 18 (64bit)

A Pipe and a Keyboard Posted on July 3, 2016 by RichardDecember 6, 2017

Latest: Mint 18.3/Google appears to have sorted the problems. 
However there is still an issue with some video drivers.
————————-

Now that Mint 18 has been released, the first thing I noticed was that Google Earth is not available in the repositories and requires a manual download and install.

Before doing that, make sure Mint updates have been applied as the LSB libraries are missing from the installation disk, but are now available as an update.

First open a terminal and enter the following –

sudo apt-get install lsb-core -y -f

Then download Google Earth.

Finally, in Terminal, run –

sudo dpkg -i google-earth-stable_current_amd64.deb

The problem with the photographs not displaying still exists, so I have created a small script.

Please note – run the script at your own risk.  It does however run perfectly on my setup.

Download it here.

Open a terminal in the folder where you have saved the download –

chmod +x GEImages.sh

sudo ./GEImages.sh

Once it has finished, run Google Earth and enjoy!

Posted in Linux, Tech stuff | Tagged Linux | 52 Replies

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