Strong as an Ox

I was really impressed with the Xdebug Tailored Installation Instructions earlier today. Setting up a dev machine at my new job wasn’t going quite according to plan because, as nice as Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx is:

1. Installing PHP via sudo apt-get install php5 installs the latest version from the repositories (version 5.3 at the time of writing)
2. We do a lot of work in Drupal, mostly version 6 which isn’t compatible with PHP 5.3 (and quite a few modules that work with Drupal 6 don’t work with Drupal 7 apparently – Drupal 7 plays a lot nicer with PHP 5.3 by all accounts).
3. So it was necessary to uninstall all the PHP 5.3 packages, add the karmic repositories to the sources.list then reinstall PHP – this time PHP 5.2

Once all this was done, it was time to install Xdebug. The tailored installation instructions seemed the best option as I’d just had to revert to a previous version of PHP. And, it couldn’t have been simpler or more straight-forward to do:

1. Go to http://xdebug.org/find-binary.php, paste in the HTML from your phpinfo() output and submit the form
2. You’ll get a nice summary and some instructions to follow
   

   Summary

   

   Instructions

After following the instructions, restart apache and reload your phpinfo() page: if your experience is anything as good as mine you should see all the xdebug configuration options set up nicely and ready to go.

I don’t normally think twice about printer test pages. And, to be honest, who does? But I was setting up a new printer at home the other day on my laptop, which dual boots into Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Koala) and Windows 7 and couldn’t help but notice that stark contrast between the Windows 7 printer test page and it’s Ubuntu counterpart:

Windows 7 printer test page

Ubuntu 9.10 printer test page

I know which one I find more useful and informative

Having recently read about Jekyll I decided to boot up Ubuntu, install all the bits and pieces and give it a try. However, I fell at the first hurdle when greeted by the following error:

Error installing gemcutter:
gemcutter requires RubyGems version >= 1.3.5

The Synaptic Package Manager reported everything as being up-to-date but only to version 1.3.1. As it turns out, there is another way to update rubygems on Ubuntu, which worked a treat! The rest of the installation was a breeze

If you are interested more info on Jekyll can be found on GitHub.