Jan

My dissertation project!

As I’m nearing the end of my university life I have decided on my honours project, I’m creating a minimal Linux installation with multiple installation options, e.g. Office work, Multimedia etc, once finished I will release the installation here for anyone wanting to try it out.

Of course I will be providing technical support through my site and the installation once released will feature the newest Alsa X-fi drivers, along with being optimized for Nvidia graphics cards from the 5-series up.

I know updates have been limited in the past 10 months or so however they will be more frequent from now on.

Aug

Installing Linux Mint KDE – Upgrading to KDE 4.3 & Amarok 1.4!

Recently Linux Mint released Mint 7 KDE edition, so I was tempted, then KDE 4.3 released shortly after, this was too much, I had to install them, so I did. Here is a simple guide to installing them both.

First step:
Download and install Linux Mint 7 KDE edition (Download links found here: Linux Mint 7 KDE release page), it installs in a very similar fashion to Ubuntu 9.04, and as such I won’t go into more detail.

Second step:
We need to add a few repositories to our sources list, so open the sources file:

kdesudo kate /etc/apt/sources.list

bash_aliases, commonly used commands – Rip CD’s to FLAC

Overview:
Well I for one use the terminal for a lot of things, the majority of things actually, so in order to speed up an already speedy task I wrote a few commands into my .bash_aliases file, which is hidden in your home directory.

But before we can use the .bash_aliases file we need to modify the .bashrc file, which again is hidden in your home directory, so:

1	gedit .bashrc

Add the following lines, or uncomment them (if you can find them, normally near the end of the file):

1
2
3

if [ -f ~/.bash_aliases ]; then
. ~/.bash_aliases
fi

This enabled the .bash_aliases file to be used, opening up a world of possibilities.
Read more here…

Jul

Its update time again!

Whats been updated?

Well after I added a few new plugins I decided it was time to run a few site updates, notably they incluede:

Updating Wordpress to 2.8.2
Updating all installed Plugins to the latest versions
Editing all Plugins to adhear to Web Standards – XHTML 1.0 Transitional, CSS 2.1, RSS, WAI A.
Adding Digg and Tweetme features.
Major rehaul of comments section – Including full Gravatar support and Quoted comments.
Sadly – ad inclusion.

Why?

These updates/plugins where applied to hopefully improve how this site functions for you, the end user – minus the ad’s, these are nessasary for server funding.

So enjoy the updates – If you encounter any issues with them, leave a comment

Jul

Recommended Plugins.

Recently I’ve been doing some small updates behind the scenes on the site and after writing code for one thing or another found a plugin that did just as good a job, so used it instead. Here is a small list of Plugins I would recommend checking out.

WP Greet Box: I wrote a small bit of code to present a box to users asking them to Digg up content or to retweet it, this Plugin takes this idea much further and presents a box to the user with relevant links, e.g. If they came from digg presents a Digg logo and button to Digg up, from Twitter a Twitter logo and a button to retweet, etc. I cannot recommend it enough, the only small downside was adjusting its CSS to be standards compliance with CSS 2.1 and a niggle with using Clear as my site is not compatible due to my theme with using Clear in the main content.
Read more here…

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My dissertation project!

Installing Linux Mint KDE – Upgrading to KDE 4.3 & Amarok 1.4!

bash_aliases, commonly used commands – Rip CD’s to FLAC

Its update time again!

Recommended Plugins.