Quick little tip, found this today when CTRL + Print Screen didn’t work for me. In Ubuntu, Print Screen will capture your whole desktop, whereas ALT + Print Screen will capture the live window. The latter being just what I needed.
Monthly Archive for January, 2007
So it was late. It was the wrong time of night to be playing with those sorts of options. And I compounded my error with the classic mistake of “oh, it’s a little change, I won’t need a backup”. Let both of those mistakes be lessons I learn.
So what happened? Well, I have a couple of other blogs with the Wordpress theme K2 on them (this is a skinned version of K2 here), and I noticed that on my main personal blog I didn’t have the same options for the sidebar. After some experimentation, I removed a conflicting plugin, then chose to upgrade the theme. I followed the instructions carefully (well apart from backing up of course), disabled the theme, and then…
Nothing. Nothing at all. The whole site was blank. No posts, no admin, no error messages, just a blank screen for every URL. Really not good at all. So what did I do? Panicked of course.
After a good five minutes of quality panic, I decided to have a look at my database. It was there for starters, which was a very good thing. Then it struck me, there must be an options table for Wordpress. And there is, wp_options by default. In there is an entry for theme. So as a last chance, I altered it back to K2 from default. And it worked, I could see the blog once more, and could sort out things from there.
Now, I wouldn’t recommend altering tables like this by hand. It was a qualified guess, but I got lucky. I didn’t deserve to after my other acts of stupidity, but I did. It was a handy thing to learn a bit about in case of that sort of disaster, but in this case it should never have happened, if I had backed up it would have been a lot easier to fix.
Fate also dictates that the morning after, I notice Lorelle’s great post on fixing a broken theme.
Well, I took the plunge last night. I meant to upgrade one of my least used blogs to Wordpress 2.1 as a test, and it was so quick and easy I ended up doing all four. Basic process was just backup the database, disable all plugins, copy the upgrade into the same directory as your main install, run the upgrade, restore the plugins. Quite painless.
I still think that Wordpress needs to built the upgrade functionality in, I should be just clicking to install it and run the above process. That is the sort of thing that takes away the admin side of Wordpress, and would draw more people into using it.
Overall, it seems a little faster, a little prettier, and nothing has broken. So, happy with it thus far.
This is a big deal for me, not so much getting it working, more that it is one of the few things I’ve been booting back into Windows for. I am hoping fairly soon to remove the Windows partition from the hard drive, and reclaim it all for Ubuntu.
Anyway, the setup is this:
1) Dock the ipod with Ubuntu open. This should place the iPod using the name you’ve give it previously on your desktop. Find the location it has mounted the iPod at using right-click and properties, and make note of this.
2) If you don’t have it installed, sudo apt-get install amarok.
3) Go to System > Preferences > Removable Drives and Media, and on the Multimedia tab, change the command for portable music players to /usr/bin/amarok (or whatever your location is for amarok)
4) In Amarok, go to settings > Configure Amarok > media devices. Add device, choose the Apple iPod Media Device, and enter the name you gave the iPod, and its mount point.
5) That is the main part done, now you need in playlists to add any URLs of podcast feeds, and configure each feed so that it automatically scans for updates, downloads when available, and adds to the media device transfer queue (just check each option when configuring the podcast.
6) When you connect the iPod, it should now launch Amarok, and queue any new shows to transfer to the iPod. At the moment I just highlight the shows and transfer them, but I am sure I can find a command to do this automatically.
So that is a bit of work to get sorted, but worth it to keep Ubuntu open! If you try this yourself, let me know how you get on.
I found this slightly trickier to set up than usual with Ubuntu, so I thought it was worth making mention of it. Basically, download from real.com and follow the instructions. The normal methods of installing such things (the package manager or using sudo apt-get install) didn’t work for me. Just saves a bit of faffing about I reckon.
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