They must have liked Alexander picture very much LOL !!!

Next step is to install secure shell ssh.

#sudo apt-get install ssh

Ubuntu comes with remote desktop manager. I tested the same and it would not work when there is no monitor connected to the system. I tried different methods and nothing worked out for me. So I decided to ditch the built in remote desktop and installed vncserver.

#sudo apt-get install vnc4server

After it is installed you should be logged as normal user and not root.

#vncserver :1 -geometry 1024x768 -depth 16

Once you issue the above command it will prompt for password. This password will be used for connecting to the server. Once it is complete we can change the setting for the server. Before we do that we have to kill the server.

#vncserver -kill :1

The configuration is kept in the file /home/userxx/.vnc/xstartup I edited this file so that I can start the server with gnome. My file looks exactly like below.

#!/bin/sh

[ -x /etc/vnc/xstartup ] && exec /etc/vnc/xstartup
[ -r $HOME/.Xresources ] && xrdb $HOME/.Xresources
xsetroot -solid grey
vncconfig -iconic &
# xterm -geometry 80x24+10+10 -ls -title "$VNCDESKTOP Desktop" &
twm &

Now everything is done. All you have to do is to restart the system which is good for the setting to work properly. One you have restarted please start the vnc server.

#vncserver

I used chicken of the vnc to connect from mac.

After connecting you get gnome session which you can keep it alive even if the chicken vnc is closed.

Now all set and I don’t want my server to start gnome session during boot. To avoid that I have to disable gdm server.

That’s all folks have a nice day

Step 1

You need to have Xcode installed on your mac. In my case I had Xcode 3.1.2 installed. You can install from your Leopard DVD or you can install iPhone SDK.

Step 2

Download and install the latest Mysql database server.

Step 3

Install Fink. You can download the version 0.9.0 which I used for compiling from here. Once you have installed open terminal and issue the following commands.

# sudo fink selfupdate
# sudo fink update-all

The above two commands will update the needed files for fink library to work properly. Once this is done you can install needed libraries for php by issuing the following command

# sudo fink install libjpeg libtiff libpng3 libxml t1lib5 libmcrypt libmhash mysql15-dev curl wget

Step 4

Install FrontBase if it is needed for you. It is installer file you can download it from here. If you don’t want to use this database system you can remove the option ‘–with-fbsql’ from the php configure command.

Step 5

Install Freetds if you want use MS-SQL in PHP5.

# sudo su
# curl -O http://ibiblio.org/pub/Linux/ALPHA/freetds/stable/freetds-stable.tgz
# tar xvzf freetds-stable.tgz
# cd freetds-0.82/
# ./configure && make && sudo make install

Incase if you feel this is not needed for your installation you can remove the option ‘–with-mssql’ and ‘–enable-dbase’ from the php configure command.

Step 6

Install Imap Client libraries files. You need this lib to be installed if you wish to compile imap. If you don’t want you can remove the option ‘–with-imap’ and ‘–with-imap-ssl’. Further reading on this topic visit here.

# sudo su
# curl -O ftp://ftp.cac.washington.edu/imap/c-client.tar.Z
# tar xvzf c-client.tar.Z
# cd imap-2007e/
# make oxp
# cd c-client/
# cp *.h /usr/local/include
# cp *.c /usr/local/lib
# cp c-client.a /usr/local/lib/libc-client.a

Step 7

Install gettext. This is a must for lot of open source projects and for localization.

# sudo su
# curl -O ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/gettext/gettext-0.17.tar.gz
# tar xvzf gettext-0.17.tar.gz
# cd gettext-0.17
# cd gettext-tools/
# ./configure
# make
# make install

Step 8

Install freetype. You need if you wish to load free type fonts in GD.

#sudo su
# wget http://mirrors.zerg.biz/nongnu/freetype/freetype-2.3.8.tar.gz
# tar xvzf freetype-2.3.8.tar.gz
# cd freetype-2.3.8
# ./configure
# make
# make install

Step 9

I think we are pretty there and now it is time to compile the big boss the PHP itself.

# sudo su
# wget http://www.php.net/get/php-5.2.8.tar.gz/from/in.php.net/mirror
# tar xvzf php-5.2.8.tar.gz
# cd php-5.2.8
# ./configure --prefix=/usr/local/php5.2.8 --with-apxs2 --with-config-file-scan-dir=/usr/local/php5.2.8/php.d --with-openssl=/usr --with-zlib=/usr --with-gd --enable-gd-native-ttf --with-jpeg-dir=/sw --with-jpeg-dir=/sw --with-png-dir=/sw --with-zlib-dir=/usr --with-ldap --with-xmlrpc --with-iconv-dir=/usr --with-snmp=/usr --enable-exif --enable-soap --enable-ftp --enable-sockets --enable-mbstring --enable-calendar --enable-bcmath --with-bz2=/usr --with-curl --with-kerberos=/usr --with-libxml-dir=/sw --with-xsl --with-t1lib=/sw --with-mcrypt=/sw --with-mhash=/sw --with-mysql=/sw --with-mysqli --with-pdo-mysql=/sw --enable-zip --with-imap --with-imap-ssl --with-gettext --with-curl=/sw --with-pear --with-regex --with-freetype-dir=/usr/local --enable-gd-native-ttf --with-iconv=shared,/opt/local --enable-dbase --enable-sqlite-utf8 --with-fbsql
# make
# make install

If you have completed till the above step without any error means that you have successfully installed PHP5. If you restart your apache server from system settings the server might not work for you. Since it might conflict a bit due to various architecture problems in apache and php build. To over come this issue you need to re-compile apache. You can do it by issuing the following commands. Further reading on this issue.

Step 10

Recompile Apache 2.

# sudo su
# wget http://apache.siamwebhosting.com/httpd/httpd-2.2.11.tar.gz
# tar xvzf httpd-2.2.11.tar.gz
# cd httpd-2.2.11/
# ./configure --enable-layout=Darwin --enable-mods-shared=all
# make
# make install

Once everything is done you should be able to run PHP. Have fun compiling your own native PHP on your mac .!!!

Downloaded the i686 DVD version and started the installation. In VMware OS list there was no fedora so I had to select red hat Linux as option. The installation went very smooth and no issues or error. I felt the installater was little heavy when compared to Ubuntu installation.

Fedora booted up well and detected most of the hardware of VMware. But It was not as smooth as Ubuntu was on VMware.

I heard there is lot of improvement and enhancements. But Ubuntu is very far ahead when it comes to Desktop Linux. I prefer sticking with Ubuntu than Fedora sulphur

I found the ip of the iPhone using the command ifconfig. Latter I was able to connect to the iPhone using ssh from my laptop . I was even able to ftp files to my iphone over SSH.

I Installed apache, php edited httpd.conf and I was able to run php scripts from my iPhone. It has all the basic modules that is needed to write a simple powerful application with sqlite. Taken a screenshot too

Wow this gadget is really amazing

I am such a fan of fedora and wanted to test fedora so checked out the website it had new release fedora 8 werewolf. It had live cd so downloaded it and tested on the laptop. To my surprise even fedora live cd detected everything. So reinstalled the laptop operating system with fedora 8.

I installed all the need software using yum as usual . Then I installed the Quake 3 and wanted burn test my laptop for performance. I opened couple of movies, music player and quake running auto demo on 800×600. The processor usage was around 90 to 95%. Everything worked amazing fast and in another workspace I was able to do normal installation and browsing. I ran the test for more than 3 hours and the laptop temperature was so normal. No overheating and no issues. I was totally amazed by the laptop performance over Linux.

I am really happy to see such a stable fedora core which is now capable of detected all hardware. Lenovo laptop performance was amazingly superb

Other than that I used the following

• Pentium 4 3.2 HT processor
• 80 GB Sata hard disk
• 1 GB RAM
• Realtek gigabyte Ethernet card
• DVD drive (mainly used for installing purpose).

Now the system is ready to rock and roll. The next big step was to install some flavor of linux and test the firewall. I was thinking of fedora latter my friend Lijeesh showed me some new variant of linux which are there only for this purpose routing and firewall solution. Some distribution which are done for routing purpose are

• IPCOP an open source distribution.
• Smoothwall has both both open source and commercial solution
• Clarkconnect is commercial solution.

I installed and tested in the same above mentioned order. And I found some issues with each installation. Let me explain the hurdles I faced in each.

IPCOP – The installation was smooth. I had some issues in setting up my on board Ethernet card. Basically it was marvell chipset. I tried installing sk98lin drivers for it and it wont work. Then the firewall not supporting NAT.

Smoothwall – The installation was smooth. It even detected the on board Ethernet and it worked. It had really a good web interface with funky ajax effects. Like live bandwidth monitor, live messenger chat viewer etc. But when it comes to routing features the was very much limited . One such problem was it didn’t NAT routing.

Clarkconnet – It is a commercial solution. It is based on red hat distribution. I had some issues with my onboard ethernet card. It was detecting it but the drivers was not working. I had to issue command “modprobe sk98lin” and everything worked well. It had all the routing features please features. I tested it well and it was stable. Currently I am using this for my routing solution.

It took me 4 days to figure out the best options for routing solution based on Linux. I am not sure that the above conclusion are 100% correct. May be I have screwed it up somewhere. But it was fun experimenting

It is quite powerful and give total control on incoming and outgoing mails. To solve my problem I need to play only with outgoing mails. There is a file named /etc/antivirus.exim is the file we need to play with. I edited the file and added the below lines to make it work for me.

if first_delivery
and ( ("$h_from:" contains "test1@imthi.com")
or ("$h_from:" contains "test2@imthi.com")
or ("$h_from:" contains "test3@imthi.com")
)
then
unseen deliver "tracker@imthi.com"
endif

The above block checks if the outgoing mail is on first delivery and who is the sender. Based on the sender I am sending a bcc copy to another mailbox. You can play more by studying the exim filter commands more

I found there is a method to install both apache 1.3 and apache 2 together. Only thing is we have to use another port than 80 for apache 2. Let me go step by step like how I installed subversion.

1. Install subversion : This was really easy on centos. I just have to use yum and it does it all.

yum install subversion

This will install all libraries needed for subversion to work. Sometimes you may come across an issue with perl-uri. Just Google for “perl uri rpm” and you can download an install the same. In my case I had to download and install.

rpm -ivh perl-URI-1.35-2.2.noarch.rpm

2. The next thing was to create a repository.

cd /var/
mkdir -p repo/source/
svnadmin create /var/repo/source

With above commands I created a subversion repo named source. You can check inside the directory if lot of files are created. If created subversion works fine .

3. Now we can proceed with apache 2 installation. I choosed apache 2.0.59

./configure --prefix=/usr/local/apache2 --with-port=2080 --enable-dav --enable-dav-fs --enable-proxy --enable-rewrite --enable-so
make
make install
/usr/local/apache2/bin/apachectl start

Apache2 installed at port 2080 with dav , proxy and rewrite and started so simple .

4. Now we have to compile mod_svn for apache 2. For this I had to download the source of subversion. Please check the version of subversion installed. You can check with the help of yum.

yum info subversion

Next download the same of subversion source and you need to compile mod_svn.

./configure --with-apxs=/usr/local/apache2/bin/apxs
make
make install

Now mod_svn is installed and activated on apache2. We can configure apache 2 to serve svn files with the help of mod_dav.

5. Configure apache 2 for svn. To do this I had to change the settings httpd.conf of apache 2. This file will be located here /usr/local/apache2/conf/httpd.conf

<location>
        DAV svn
        SVNPath /var/repo/source
</location>

Restart apache2 once you made the above changes. Now you should be able to see the svn files from this url http://localhost:2080/svn/. You should be able to see the subversion files at revision 0. There is will be nothing in it as we have not added any files.

6. Now we have add proxy to apache 1.3 so that we can internally proxy the files between apache 2 and apache 1. You can download the source of currently installed apache 1.3 or you can find the same in /home/installd/buildapache/apache_1.3.xx/src/modules/proxy
Just goto that directory and run this command

/usr/local/apache/bin/apxs -i -c *.c

That will install mod_proxy to apache 1.3

7. You have add this setting to apache 1.3 conf file to proxy the http://localhost:2080/svn/ in standard port 80 of some website.
Add these line to any virtual host present in the conf file.

ProxyRequests Off
ProxyPass / http://locahost:2080/svn

I had added for the virtual host svn.imthi.com.

You can view my subversion at http://svn.imthi.com/ username : guest and password : guest.

All done. If you wish add authentication you can Google on how to add simple http authentication. You can even add policies if you want. The final setting should look something like this with authentication and polices

<location>
        DAV svn
        SVNPath /var/repo/source
        AuthzSVNAccessFile /var/repo/conf/svnpolicy
        AuthType Basic
        AuthName "Imthiaz Subversion repository"
        AuthUserFile /var/repo/conf/svnusers
        Require valid-user
</location>

For this svn book will be of great use. Have fun …!!!

In windows it was easy to do using putty. Since there was no putty on mac I was lost a bit. Then this article helped me

http://www.engr.wisc.edu/computing/best/rdesktop-mac.html

The above article explains it all so no point writing the info here