Pandoc commands

I wrote about Pandoc last year, but I’m using it more and more and I’ve found myself editing the original post a fair few times. This is the updated 2016 version that gathers together useful commands I’ve learned so far. Last year I found myself needing to do a lot of document conversion, and maintaining … Read more

Disabling X11 on Raspberry Pi build of Ubuntu

Executing graphical disable will present a console login on the next boot, with no X11 or associated services running. If you want to get the full Ubuntu MATE desktop back, run graphical enable and reboot. See https://ubuntu-mate.org/raspberry-pi/ for more information on this build and how it works.

Setting up WordPress

The following instructions describe how I install WordPress on Ubuntu. The instructions may differ slightly for other server environments, but the basic principles should be the same. This requires shell access to the server, but once it’s finished the WordPress instance(s) should be capable of being administered through a web browser. Part 1 – Installing … Read more

Shutter

Shutter is the best tool I’ve found for taking screen shots. It’s in the Ubuntu software centre and should handle all of our needs.

Ubuntu upgrade bug

Fix for a bug where updating software fails to work. First, kill any instance of appstreamcli. Then do the following: cd /tmp && mkdir asfix cd asfix wget https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+archive/primary/+files/appstream_0.9.4-1ubuntu1_amd64.deb wget https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+archive/primary/+files/libappstream3_0.9.4-1ubuntu1_amd64.deb sudo dpkg -i *.deb See https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/appstream/+bug/1579712 for more details.

Authenticating WordPress

The quick and dirty way is using wp-require-login, which can be downloaded from https://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-require-login/. Only people registered with the site can view content, which makes it ideal for intranets etc.

Testing Ubuntu

To download an iso of the latest Ubuntu daily build then go to http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/daily-live/current/. There are also some packages on Ubuntu that make this sort of testing easier: testdrive – run the daily Ubuntu ISO in a virtual machine (meta-package) testdrive-cli – run the daily Ubuntu ISO in a virtual machine (command line) testdrive-common – … Read more

Software update scripts

Mac OS X #!/bin/bash echo “updateall v.1.1 for OS X. This software will upgrade all your Apple/Homebrew software.” # Run this as a normal user. Your admin password will be asked for if required. # Update all Apple software (requires admin password at this point) sudo softwareupdate -i -a # Update all software installed via … Read more

Setting up WordPress multisite

The instructions at http://codex.wordpress.org/Create_A_Network are good, and are mostly enough to get it up and running. There are two more things to do on Ubuntu servers: Enable mod_rewrite by issuing the command a2enmod rewrite in a terminal. Open /etc/apache2/apache2.conf and find the part that says: <Directory /var/www/> Options Indexes FollowSymLinks AllowOverride None Require all granted … Read more