Abbas’ Blog

Recently I tried to install Fedora Core 4 on my brother’s Acer TravelMate 4152NLCi Laptop, Installation went on smoothly, however I faced few problems when I started the laptop for first time after installation-

# Issue 1 - Start-up got stuck on PCMCIA service

When the laptop rebooted after the installation, the start up got stucked while initializing PCMCIA service. To overcome this I choose interactive start up and selected ‘N’ when asked for PCMCIA service . The laptop start up went on smoothly and for the first time I saw the login screen. After login the first thing I did was turned OFF the PCMCIA service from System Services.

# Issue 2 - No Sound

It detected the sound card correctly during installation, however I was not able to hear any sound when playing the Test Sound. I followed the instructions given here, but it didnt helped, then after searching the internet I got a major breathrough from this site. The only tweak I did to adjust, is to open the ALSA mixer and turn on external amplifier option (under Switches Tab in KMix). This worked magically for me and I was able to hear the sound then onwards.

There were no other major issues and FC4 is now working fine on Acer TravelMate 4152.

Many a times we need to delete a particular folder which is present in every subfolder of the parent directory. One such situation is the subversion’s working copy. The working copy of project which is in subversion contains .svn hidden folders. When moving the working copy to the webroot, we generally want to delete all the .svn folders as they take a lot of space.

Directories can be deleted recursively very easily in linux. To do so first go to the parent directory and then issue rm -rf `find . -type d -name .svn` command. This will delete all .svn folders from the parent as well as sub-directories. Replace .svn from the command as per your needs.

Coppermine’s development is done on sourceforge.net. Latest stable version of coppermine can be downloaded from the download page.

However there is no zip package available for Coppermine NG. You will need to check it out from the SVN repository. Coppermine NG is in early alpha stage and not meant for production servers. Currently only testers are using it. If you want to check out cpgNG and its cool features then follow the steps given below.

1. If you don’t have a SVN client then install it first. In most of the linux distros you get a command line utility.
2. Then issue svn co https://svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/coppermine/trunk/cpgNGDevel /path/to/folder command.
3. Above command will checkout the cpgNG files in /path/to/folder directory. Change this path as per your needs.

Now follow the normal installation procedure of coppermine and you are done.

In the year 2004, I came across Coppermine Photo Gallery (CPG) which is an open source project on sourceforge. Being developing PHP based applications i thought why not take a look at the source code of CPG. This was the first time ever when i came across an open source application (ofcourse apart from php). I found it very interesting and i started feeling strong penchant for coppermine. In the next few days i studied the CPG code and started contributing on the coppermine support forums.

Soon i found myself in the Development Team of coppermine. At that time cpg1.4 was in beta stage. Much of the work was already completed and i only got chance to fix few bugs. In year end of 2005 cpg1.4 was release as stable.

Classic coppermine had a self templating system and didn’t used a database abstraction layer. Much of the code is procedural programming based. We (Dr.Tarique Sani, Aditya Mooley and me) thought why not develop a next generation cpg where we will use oops based programming and smarty as templating system. So we started working on cpgNG (Coppermine Next Generation). cpgNG is written totally from scratch. cpgNG is now in alpha stage. To download and get more info on cpgNG go here. To download cpg go here.

So this will be my first post. One thing is for sure that i am not very good at writing. So please excuse me if you find it boring or banal.

This blog will be mainly about my experiences in web programming with emphasis on LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySql, PHP) technoligies. I will also try to discuss some of the open source softwares i have come acrossed.

Also i will try to share some of my personal life experiences. Lets see what i have got to share……