Place of Stuff

I have said this many times before: UPGRADE WORDPRESS WHEN PROMPTED.  This one is in the style of “beating you about the head and body and then caning you across the eyeballs“.  Why?  Because a hack has been discovered that makes your older, more stable, more comfortable WordPress.org install very insecure and really you may as well make the password Pa55w0rd – because your older version can and will be pwned.

Now that I have your attention….  Go to Lorelle’s site, Robert Scoble’s site and the WordPress Dev Blog to see details of this new exploit.  If you have version 2.8.4 (like what I do), you are more secure.  As well as upgrading, remove the default admin account and create a new one (reverse order, is good on that one), check for phantom admin accounts and make sure you are using a strong password.  There are other things to do, but that will keep you going for now.

I regularly get comments such as “if I upgrade it breaks all my plugins”, “my theme doesn’t work if I upgrade now” and so on.  You now get to make a value judgment: if you don’t upgrade you could end up no longer owning your blog vs giving up or changing a few plugins or a theme.  Which of these is the worst case scenario for you?

Upgrade now. You know it makes sense.

Just a quick post here.  I had been having real issues with the RSS feeds over the last few weeks.  In short, they weren’t working.  See the issues I was having over here.  As a good forum goer, I hit Google and also searched the forums for a solution.  To no avail.

So if you see this:

PROBLEM: FeedMedic Alert for http://feeds2.feedburner.com/<blog name>/EaHL
07/03/09 13:59

FeedBurner had trouble retrieving your Source Feed: http://www.<blog name>.org/feed/

The error message is:

Error on line 2: The processing instruction target matching "[xX][mM][lL]" is not allowed.

The fix that worked for me is here.  This fixed the issue immediately and I feel relieved.  Thank you to w3it.org your advice was great.

I am posting this in case anyone else has the problem and also in case a future upgrade of WordPress brings back the problem.

Because I hold you all in such high regard (*pause, gesture, sincere forehead*) I’m going to come clean about a few things.  Things you need to know about. (*pause, gesture, furrowed brow*).  Some of these things you will have noticed immediately, others you may not have (*look around, meeting everyone’s eye, sincere half-smile*).

My all-knowing dashboard kindly informed me that WordPress 2.7.1 was out and that I had to upgrade.  No problemo, thought I, piece of cake.  The 5 minute install and upgrade instructions are very clear and a complete idiot can follow them and do it all.  Right?  Guys?  Yeah, I got distracted.  Only for a second but it was enough.  I was ssh-ing and moving stuff with panache and then I realised, I had cunningly managed to overwrite the wp-content folder with a fresh one.  This is the folder that contains the theme (and any changes) and all the plugins.  So yeah, I am a true genius.

So there you are, a cautionary tale and all that.  Fortunately, it gave me the opportunity to make a few changes here.  Much of this is in the background, I was able to take out a bunch of plugins that no longer work and update a few others.  I also enabled IntenseDebate and it imported everything very quickly indeed this time – it will only really matter to you if you comment on other blogs that also use it.  SpamKarma2 has been sadly discontinued, so I have gone with the default Akismet.  There are a few other bits of functionality that I’m missing, but I’ll get that sorted.

Finally, and most obviously, you’ll see that I have a smallish (200×200) AdSense ad.  This is not my new money making scheme.  After seeing one of Dominic’s latest posts, I became curious as to what I would see on my own site.  You will, hilariously, see lots of ads for psychics and other snake-oil salesmen.  Here’s the deal, click the ads or don’t – this really is up to you.  I have a day job and everything and it pays well enough that I only need one paying job.  On the other hand, if you do click the ads and go through to these places, you will be making a psychic donate to an openly skeptical site.  As I said, the choice is entirely yours, there are no tip jar or donate buttons here and this was simply to see what comes up.

There may well be other changes and tweaks coming up, but these are the most obvious.

I won’t bore you with my personal journey with Linux (it’s pretty much try, give up, try again, give up, try again, distro hop, pick a distro), but based on this comment, I thought it would be worthwhile discussing how best to try Linux out and the reasons you could find it useful to do so and why you may not find it so useful…  Call it a belated Christ-/Mithras-/Horus-mas present to the world.

First, the reasons people test out Linux.  These are many and varied, but the main ones seem to be: they heard it was cool, it was sold as a major panacea for all computing ills, they are geeks and think it’s de rigeur to do so, it looked good on a friend’s PC, it solves a problem they have, they are sick of lock in and viruses.  There are other reasons, but I think these are representative.  Here’s the thing: none of these reasons are bad reasons.  I have tried various things out over the years for similar reasons – some I have stuck with and some I haven’t.  The more rabid Linux evangelists will tell you that you have to try it and that there’s something wrong with you if you don’t.  I’m not going to do that.  It would be great if the balance were tipped from proprietary OSes to the FOSS way, but I am realistic enough to know that this isn’t going to happen soon.  We are making major inroads, particularly on the server front, but by being realistic I have more chance of being persuasive.

If you are planning (however vaguely) to try out Linux I cannot stress this enough: do your research.  Look at the more popular distributions and check that your hardware is supported and won’t have any major issues.  Google is an excellent resource for this, Linux is an operating system that wouldn’t have come in to being without the internet and problems and fixes are discussed widely all over the place.  Head over to Distrowatch and see what people are looking into, hit the various websites that distributions have and see what they look like and make sure that you feel comfortable with the look and feel of the distribution.

An amazingly cool resource that will be of great help is the Live CD.  This gives you an entire operating system on either a CD or DVD.  Many distros offer this and you can use them to see whether Linux is for you and to test out what a distro will look like and get a great feel for the usage.  You can use them for diagnosing and fixing problems or as a handy and portable method for always having Linux on whichever PC you use.  They do not make changes to your hard drive and so you don’t have to install anything.  For the price of the download and a blank CD or DVD you can save yourself a lot of hassle.

Investigate dual booting.  You don’t have to wipe your current OS to test out another system, you can simply give it space on your hard drive and switch between.  This will give you the best idea of how it will work with your system and whether it will be for you on a daily basis.  Dual booting is pretty simple and straightforward.  It will also enable you to research problems on your known working OS if you do hit snags.

Don’t give up on your first failure.  I have lost count of the number of times that I have seen posts about how crap Linux is only to find that the poster has used it for a few hours and given up at the first hurdle.  Remember that Windows has a major lock in with a number of hardware vendors (and Mac restricts the hardware it will run on) and also software vendors.  This means that hardware and software will always work on those systems because the vendors will make it work.  Most of the drivers and software on Linux only run because the coders are dedicated and intelligent enough to make it work.  (I won’t go into the “Linux is a kernel not an OS” here because it’s irrelevant to the discussion)  For a good chunk of it’s life, Linux coders worked for the joy of coding and the fact that it runs so well on such varied hardware is testament to their skill and dedication.

Finally, research, research, research.  I’m going to mention this again because it is all important.  Think about what you want to run it on – if you have any obscure hardware or important hardware (webcams, scanners, ISP provided modems) look around the web to see if they are supported.  If you have a particular piece of software that you absolutely must have running look to see if there’s a Linux version or if there is a different piece of software that will run just as well.  Read Linux Is Not Windows – it may be a few years old, but it is still relevant.

None of this is rocket science.  It’s been a few years since Linux emerged from the “geeks only” state to an “anyone can get it running state.”  You can install Linux in around 20 minutes (from start to finish) and you will have a full desktop and a varied amount of software.  There are some 40,000+ software packages available for it from a variety of resources, so it’s likely that you will find the software you need.  You don’t have to reboot after each software install or update.  There are no real viruses available for it and malware just isn’t there.  Out of the box, it is more secure than Windows and will cost you a lot less in monetary terms.  You can distribute it freely and legally and this is explicit in the licence.  You don’t have to agree to EULAs or other restrictive licences.

So there you are, that’s how to do it.  If you want to know how not to do it, just don’t follow my advice.  The vast majority of people who fail to install and run Linux (or one of the BSDs or any other alternative OS) do so because they went in with the wrong attitude.  Before you can ride a bike or drive a car or do most tasks, there are steps to take before you do it – and computers are no different.  There is no magic bullet which will make you an automatic expert, despite the advertising, the only real way to do it is to research and persevere.  If you do decide to stick with it there are any number of resources that will assist you, from hard copy books to online forums to blogs like this.  If you stick with it you will be part of a community and a movement and will meet many interesting and fun people.  My first trip to the US was off the back of Linux – so how’s that, run an OS and travel the world?

Something which I have been thinking about recently is the rate of successes for individual users in

HPLIP

Linux.  For Linux as a whole, there have been numerous successes ranging from it’s growth into the mainstream (though there is still far to go) in the server world through to the desktop take up in the last few years.  One thing that I would suggest has slowed is the individual users that can report their own successes.

Let me elaborate.  Today I went out and bought an HP Deskjet F4280 all-in-one printer – it was on sale and I have needed a multifunction device for work and home for a long time.  I went with HP because I have long been a fan of their printers and I know that their Linux support is excellent.  I went with this model because I saw in the catalogue that it had Linux support (though it stated “web only”, I knew that it would work).  I plugged it in, ran the command sudo hp-setup and Kubuntu did the rest.  I now have the printer working as well (or even better) as it would in Windows.  I opened the HP toolbox and the scanner worked first time without errors.  It was an absolutely pain-free experience and was much much quicker than the whole thing will be on Monday when I install it to my work laptop running XP.

On the one hand, that is a clear success – HP now supports Linux to the point that I can put a new printer on my system and have it work, literally, out-of-the-box.  Enormous thanks to HP, to the coders who make this possible and to the community who have pushed hard over the years.  All we need now is for other manufacturers to do the same.  But, and this may sound ungrateful, where’s my success?  I remember the days when, with massive amounts of Googling and help from communities, I was able to install and run fairly commonplace hardware and software.  Instead, now, it’s all really easy.  I am positive that I’m not alone in having things work really easily with no problems, but wonder if I am the only left with an empty feeling when I realise that all the work is now done for me?

Long time fans of this space will be aware that I’m a Slacker.  However, when something wasn’t working as easily as it could, I installed Kubuntu to see what the latest version (Hardy Heron) was like and whether it could tempt me to switch permanently.

Firstly, even though all Linux distros are pretty identical at heart (largely the same commands, file structures and so on) there are a number of differences that can make one set of users argue incessantly with another set.  Firstly, Slackware is now the oldest distro still in use – Slackware first began in 1993, followed by Debian, followed by Red Hat.  You will notice that I have left off Suse, that’s because it started life using a Slackware base and then used a Red Hat base.  So in terms of “pure” distros, Slackware was first, followed closely by Debian, followed closely by Red Hat.  In fact, almost all Linux distros use one of those three as their base, as shown on the graphical timeline.  And to wind this paragraph up, Kubuntu is the KDE variant of Ubuntu, which is based on Debian.  There may be a large number of available distributions out there, but there are very few distros to base them off.

In terms of approach and use, Kubuntu and Slackware are very different.  The Slackware methodology is that almost everything should be done by hand: installing programs, configuring programs and so on.  Kubuntu focuses on ease of use: installation of programs is via the Adept Package Manager and using the apt command.  There are also wizards and you know when updates are available by the icon in your system tray.  It is also notable that Slackware come with plain vanilla KDE whereas Kubuntu has a very attractive configuration of KDE installed.

The biggest difference, for me, has been in the sheer amount of hand holding Kubuntu does for you – you are told when a package has a new update and are prompted to install it, the wireless network configuring is largely done for you, if a kernel update is available the update is installed and configured along the lines of the existing kernel.  As well, when you first go to your home folder, you are given a number of pre-created directories – for Documents, Pictures, Templates and Music, for example – and really you could quite happily start using it without having to make any sort of major change yourself.  And that is not a bad thing.  Most Linux users were, or are, Windows users and having something familiar is a great way to ease them into using an entirely different operating system.

Slackware users, on the other hand, are largely left to their own devices.  Slackware, on install, drops you directly into a command prompt.  There are no obvious instructions and you are left to figure it out on your own.  This is entirely by design – if you are expecting to be shown a graphical desktop on first boot and don’t get it, many users would be very stuck and unable to continue.  Slackers know how to get from command line to GUI and so are not stuck.  In Slackware, if you want something to run you have to install it and hand configure it.  If you want a new kernel, you can either download a new one from the mirrors or go to www.kernel.org and get it yourself.  The only pre-created directories available are the ones KDE creates by default.

In a lot of ways, comparing the two distros is like comparing apples and oranges.  Both have a different target audience, both do things differently by design.  However, that is not to say that one can’t go from one to the other. The desktop environment in both is KDE and so a lot of things are done the same.  If you spend enough time using Kubuntu, you will be able to use Slackware – the directories available are similar and many of the commands available are distro-agnostic.

But with all that said, I am a Slacker.  Kubuntu is an excellent distribution of Linux and there are many reviews of it on the internet to give you an idea of what it can do.  I will say that it’s very stable and has a great range of default programs available.  However, I am constantly finding myself hitting the same barrier I always hit when I use a distro like this: I am reluctant to hand configure or install things for fear of breaking the install.  This is a problem that I have hit when using Fedora and Debian (to an extent) and any other distribution with a package manager or that uses wizards to do anything.  At the finish, I like hand configuring and I like to install programs from scratch.  Finally, the old saying applies: once you go Slack, you’ll never go back.