Monthly Archive for May, 2008

Setup Wordpress on Nearly Free Speech

Published
by
cnu
on May 11, 2008
in FSlog, Sites and Tutorial
. 1 Comment

Nearly Free Speech.net logoYesterday I moved this blog over to NearlyFreeSpeech.net hosting, which I think has a great hosting plan for almost everyone. You only pay for what you use. The disk space is a bit costly than others ($0.01 per MB), but that cost is due to the numerous backups they take. The bandwidth cost is great, just $1 per GB. And there is no fixed cost for each month. I wanted to move FSLog to NFS, and finally did it. This is a small tutorial on getting wordpress installed and the various plugins I have used.

After you have setup an account with NFS and setup a site, you will be given the site details - like FTP, SSH, etc. I prefer using SSH if available, as it is faster to download and install directly than to get it on my machine and uploading it again.

Just ssh to the site and download the latest wordpress tarball and untar it


$ wget http://wordpress.org/latest.tar.gz
$ tar -xvzf latest.tar.gz

If you want to setup the blog at a subdirectory, just rename the ‘wordpress’ folder to something like ‘blog’. If you want it to be at the root of the site, just move all the contents of the wordpress folder to the parent directory.

Then visit your site http://your-site.nfshost.com or the domain if you have registered one.

It will guide you through the install process which is very easy. You just have to give the MySQL database details. You may need to temporarily give write permissions to the public folder, so that the installer can write a config file.

After this, login to your admin page and remember to change the password from Users menu.

Plugins

After you have your blog setup, its time to get some basic plugins installed. You can get more functionality by installing these plugins.

All you have to do is just download the zip files to the wp-content/plugins/ directory and unzip them. The plugins I have installed are:

WP-SuperCache
This caches your blog’s contents as plain old HTML, so that your server doesn’t have to process and fetch all the data from the database. Previously the install process was a bit difficult, but now it has become very easy. Just unzip and activate.
reCAPTCHA
Prevent comment spam by using CAPTCHA for your comments form, also help in converting books to electronic format.
Wordpress.com Stats
Track your popular posts and other statistics by using the wordpress.com’s stats.
Google Analyticator
Google Analytics is an excellent user metrics analysis tool with bright colorful charts and best of all, it is free. This plugin asks just for your Google Analytics’ UID.
Feedburner Feedsmith
Feedburner is a great service for your RSS feeds and I have been using that for this blog for a long time. This plugin is now the official plugin and it automatically redirectly your feeds to the FeedBurner link.

These are my list of plugins. So, what are the plugins that your have?

Acer Aspire 5050 Atheros AR5006EG wireless in Ubuntu 8.04

Published
by
cnu
on May 3, 2008
in Hardware and Tutorial
. 2 Comments

Atlast I got wireless working in my Acer Aspire 5050’s Atheros 5006 under the newly released Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy Heron with the madwifi drivers. (BTW the upgrade to 8.04 from 7.10 screwed up my X server and I reinstalled from scratch). Previously I was using the ndiswrapper drivers and they would only work the first 5 minutes. Anyway here is a tutorial on how to get WiFi working if you have one of the Atheros cards.

  1. First get the patched madwifi drivers from the site and extract them to some place (maybe your desktop)
  2. You need to compile these drivers, so you must sudo apt-get install build-essential.
  3. Then cd into that directory which you extracted recently and do a make, sudo make install
  4. Then add the following two lines to this file /etc/modules 
    ath_pci
wlan_scan_sta
  5. Then make sure that you disabled Atheros from System > Administration > Hardware Drivers (also called Restricted drivers management). If you don’t disable this, the modules which you added in the previous lines wont be loaded.
  6. Then restart your system to find a new device named ath0 (when you ifconfig)

PS: I know it has been almost 5 months since I posted here. I am giving the (s/l)ame reason here that I was busy. I haven’t been giving much attention to this blog. If you can give some ideas or suggestions on better managing my time it would really help.