ST20G5 - Installing Ubuntu Server 6.06

[^rooker]

[PROBLEM #1]
When trying to boot Ubuntu server 6.06, the shuttle PC ST20G5 froze with

kernel panic: not syncing

Also knoppix refused to boot, freezing at the very first line:

audit: (1157380319.130:0) initialized

I thought it might have been a problem, because I booted from USB-CDROM, but booting from IDE didn't change anything at all.

I've tried disabling APIC in the BIOS or changing the compatibility mode to 1.1, but that didn't help anything.


[SOLUTION]
Seems to be an already known error: https://launchpad.net/distros/ubuntu/+s ... +bug/38263

I've disabled APIC in the BIOS and added the kernel parameters:

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acpi=off irqpoll

and it proceeded.

[^rooker]

[PROBLEM]
Although there's a package called "pear" for ubuntu 6.06, it didn't really install all the things I wanted. That's why I went for the "go-pear.php" solution, setting the

When running go-pear.php, I received the following error:

Allowed memory size of 8388608 bytes exhausted (tried to allocate 71 bytes)...

[SOLUTION]
within the php.ini (in that case it's in "/etc/php4/apache2/php.ini"), I changed

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memory_limit = 8M

to

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memory_limit = 32M

[NOTES]
When adding additional packages, using the commandline "pear install <package name>", a different php.ini file is used, so you might run into this error again...

hint: run a simple script containing "phpinfo();" from the commandline to see which php.ini is being used!
(in my case it was "/etc/php5/cli")

[^rooker]

I got this nice error when I tried to run a php website, which is writing logfiles:

...failed to open stream: HTTP wrapper does not support writeable connections.

I simply misconfigured the filename parameter for this! It had a "http://" prefix, but should have had a "file://" prefix.

[^rooker]

[PROBLEM]
While I was trying to install the Oracle OCI8 instant client, I ran into the following errormessage:

phpize: command not found

It took me quite some time to figure out why it was missing, because I didn't know which pacakge it should have come with. (php commandline stuff was installed)

[SOLUTION]
If you're doing it with package management, make sure that "php-dev" (PHP Development) is installed.

[^rooker]

[PROBLEM]
When I tried to install the pear package "XML_Serializer":

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pear install XML_Serializer

I got this message:

Failed to download pear/XML_Serializer within preferred state "stable", latest release is version 0.18.0, stability "beta", use "channel://pear.php.net/XML_Serializer-0.18.0" to install
Cannot initialize 'XML_Serializer', invalid or missing package file
Package "XML_Serializer" is not valid
install failed

...so I ran:

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pear install XML_Serializer-beta

After which it issued problems with unresolved dependencies:

Did not download dependencies: pear/XML_Util, pear/XML_Parser, use --deps or --onlyreqdeps to download automatically

...so I tried:

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pear install --onlyreqdeps XML_Serializer-beta

Which worked fine.

[^rooker]

To add a new user from the commandline (other HowTos explain only how to do it in the GUI), use "adduser".
By default your user should be in the group "users", so you'll have to supply the groupid (gid) for this group.

- Get it like this:

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cat /etc/group | grep users

- By default it has gid 100

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adduser username --gid 100

(if you want to add a system user, use "adduser --system username .....")

If you create a user with the default unix commands "useradd", your user will be somewhat "raw" - e.g.: no useful prompt, no bashrc, etc...

Option #2: From scratch...
# Create the "admin" group for sudoing: (missing on Ubuntu server)
# (the gid 112 was taken from another ubuntu system)
groupadd -g 112 admin

# create a user in group "users" (=gid 100)
adduser username -gid 100
adduser username admin

# tell the system that all users in group "admin" may sudo:
# -- manually:
## visudo -f /etc/sudoers

# -- or scripted:
cp /etc/sudoers
cat <<EOF >>/etc/sudoers

# Members of the admin group may gain root privileges
%admin ALL=(ALL) ALL
EOF


Test it by logging out and login as "username" - and then try "sudo cat /etc/shadow" - if you get the listing, sudo is working correctly.