I installed Mediawiki, the software that runs Wikipedia, on an Ubuntu
Warty machine yesterday. I issued an sudo -s command at the start so
that I didn’t have to type sudo repeatedly.

To get access to all the different package repositories, I uncommented
the warty universe lines in /etc/apt/sources.list and added one line so
that I had:

deb http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ warty main restricted
deb http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ warty universe
deb-src http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ warty universe
deb ftp://ftp.debian.org/debian sarge main contrib non-free #


Then I installed a load of software:

apt-get install apache2-mpm-prefork apache2-prefork-dev
libapache2-mod-php4 php4-dev php4-mysql php4-pear


Untar Mediawiki in the default Apache directory:

cd /var/www
tar xzvf mediawiki-1.4.4.tar.gz


Ubuntu has a mechanism for Apache configuration that I don’t
understand. I used the commands below as a quick hack to relocate
Mediawiki so that Apache will find it:

mv apache2-default/ apache2-default_orig/
mv mediawiki-1.4.4/ apache2-default


Set the MySQL root password:

mysqladmin -u root password 'password'


I realized that I don’t really know how to use mysqladmin, so after
a few weak attempts, I figured PHPMyAdmin was a better solution.

apt-get install phpmyadmin


I used PHPMyAdmin, which showed up at http:///phpmyadmin. At that
address, I was able to log in as “root” with my MySQL root
password, set above.

Then the standard steps of the Mediawiki installation:

chmod a+w config/
mv LocalSettings.php ..
chmod ug-w config/

The wiki I am setting up needs to be able to display equations, which
requires the texvc extension to Mediawiki. Texvc parses Tex markup and
feeds it to ImageMagick, which generates .png files of the equations. I
needed gcc to compile the code.

apt-get install gcc ocaml imagemagick gs cjk-latex tetex-extra
php4-imagick

Compile the code:

cd /var/www/apache2-default/math/
make

Wikimedia’s site on running Mediawiki on Debian was quite useful.

I just upgraded my desktop machine from SuSE Linux 9.1 Pro to 9.3 Pro.
It took a little over an hour, and nothing particularly horrible
happened, so far as I can tell.

I did run into two problems:

1. The Shuttle SS51G that I have uses the Intel 8×0 sound driver.
Since 9.1, the driver has dropped support for the “joystick”
parameter, but /etc/modprobe.d/sound still tried to set it to zero,
which gave me an error about no volume controls being present, as well
as a huge pile of errors in dmesg. A German website had the answer:
http://suse-linux-faq.koehntopp.de/q/q-suse93-snd_intel8×0.html

For those of us who don’t know German, the answer can be summarized
as “delete joystick=0 from /etc/modprobe.d/sound.”

2. The second problem I ran into is that like Red Hat, SuSE is worried
about getting sued by Fraunhofer, a German company that owns several
patents involved in mp3 encoding and decoding (licensed through Thomson
Multimedia in the US). As a result, they do not include software that
decodes mp3s in SuSE 9.3 Pro. However, SuSE does allow you to download
packages from their FTP site that add the ability to decode mp3s. I
don’t know whether they changed their minds after the CDs were
pressed or whether there is some legal difference between me downloading
the files from them directly instead of from a CD that they made.
Unfortunately, I was a coward when I started ripping my CDs a few years
ago, so I didn’t rip them to .ogg, which is similar in quality and
compression to mp3, but not encumbered by patents. On the other hand,
the ipod does not and may never support .ogg. On the third hand, at
least one of the mp3 patents expires in 2015.

SuSE 9.3 is pretty slick. An SVG icon theme is included, which is fun to
play with, even if the icons look like bitmaps once you stop stretching
them. Beagle, the new desktop search program is reasonably functional,
at least at first glance, although I have not figured out how to make it
index cached chats in Chatzilla (possibly because Chatzilla may not
cache chats).

So, with that done, I’m going back to counting down the days until
Firefox 1.1 is released with native SVG support sometime in June. Since
I don’t actually know when it will be released, I’ve decided to
count up instead.