Danny-T.co.uk

Any decent web designer nowadays understands the value of cross browser and cross platform compatability. You can put a serious dent in your site traffic by only making it available to say, just Internet Explorer. Unfortunately the luxury of having every browser on every platform isn’t something alot of agencies have the time or money to setup.

www.browsercam.com is a manged service providing access to every type of platform/browser combination and any combination they don’t have they can setup for you. They offer two main services, screen capture and remote access.

The screen capture lets you select the OS (type and version), browser, screen res and whether flash is installed or not, you then enter a url of your site you wish to test and it will fire off and take a screen grab from each of the chosen setups and save it as an image file for you to browse. A very quick way of checking a page in alot of different setups quickly. You can also set it to crawl hyperlinks and grab child pages.

Remote access does exactly what it says on the tin. Using the excellent VNC viewer you can have remote access to an actual machine to use to check how your site works on various platforms.

The pricing is reasonable and you can sign up for 24 hour, monthly, three monthly or annual access to either or both services. I have tried both (screen grab offers a free 24 hour trial and unlimited remote access for 24 hours is just $19.99) and the service works well. There was one minor usability issue I discovered (which I emailed about and had a quick response) but overall this is an excellent service I will be using again. I have access to a number of platforms in our office, but nothing compared to this. The convenience of this service which I can use from one machine is too good not to use.

I happened across a technology known as Xgl in my new exploration of the world of Linux. First thoughts were along the lines of “sounds nice, but whats the use?” when reading about 3D desktops and transparent windows.

However, I then watched a video by Novell and thought “Looks REALLY cool, i’ll have a play and figure the point out later”.

Installed xgl and compiz (a window manager for xgl) with ease (go Yast2!) and am a big fan of the results. Basically I get some snazzy windows effects (jelly-like, edge-snapping, transparency etc) which are nice to look at but arguably not any real use, maybe transparency but thats about it. I get real time screen switching (think alt+tab in windows but instead of icons real time thumbs of each app). But the 3D desktop is really cool.

A 3D desktop is just that a desktop in 3D, you can set how many faces it has, default is four which i have found to be plenty. Basically just use it as normal but acres more desktop space. I first expected it to be difficult to navigate and manage where each window is but this isn’t the case. The taskbar offers quick access to any window, you can zoom out to see all desktops stretched across one screen, theres even a shortcut to display all windows in one view for you to select the required one.

My only issue so far with this has been there is a setting to have random water drops which ripple across the screen, having played about with this I found it takes a fair amount of work for my old desktop to run so tried disabling it. No go! I’ve tried the shortcut (Shift F9), the window properties dialogue but it refuses to stop. I’ve resorted to setting the frequency to very low but I still get a drop every 10 minutes which is annoying. I’ve been referred to the config files which I will give a try next.

Overall though I’m a big fan of Xgl and hope it brings some more end-user attention to the Linux desktop.

This information is everywhere and is by no means anything special. But as a recent convert to apache from IIS I need somewhere to put this as reference:

To setup multiple hosts in apache, add the following into http.conf

  <VirtualHost 10.1.2.3>
  DocumentRoot /www/vhost1
  ServerName  www.my-dom.com
  </VirtualHost>

Full details over on apache.org
Genius huh?

I’ve also been creating symlinks to my user’s public_html folder, a symlink is kindof a shortcut or virtual directory equivilent in windows/iis. The following command line code is used for creating symlinks:

ln -s /home/your_user_name/public_html/folder /srv/www/htdocs/folder" 

This creates a shortcut from the Apache htdocs to the users personal html docs.

I’ve been playing with Suse 10.1 for almost a week now. I’ve certainly had some ups and downs with it. A big part of the problem was my own lack of knowledge in the Linux department.

One of the great features of Suse is Yast2 basically a tool for managing everything. The neat part of it is the software manager. You open it you search for something E.g. “apache” it will then offer a list of modules and indicate if they are installed or not. Those that you want to install you tick then let Suse do its thing. You can add sources if your desired software isn’t in the list and it will pick them up from a url or local files.

It took me a while to get apache, mysql and php firing on all cylinders, this might be because of my initial attempt to use Xampp, then deciding I wanted a full blown setup as Xampp isn’t recommended for production use. I ended up using Yast2 to uninstall and reinstall everything and all seemed to be fine.

Overall I’m fairly happy with the experience, theres some inconsistencies and definitely a steep learning curve, I’m also not a complete convert by any means but early exploration has been reasonably satisfying.

My next venture is going to be to try and get the very sexy looking xgl setup and see how my old machine copes with it.

I’ll be adding to this list as I go, it would seem even with the very beautiful Desktop engines (i’m using Gnome at the moment) there is still very much a necessity to know some command line stuff.

The Basics

Linux Console = Command Line in windows, there are various flavours available
File structure referencing = like in web development to refer to a file from root use “/foldername” or to refer to a file or folder in the current director no starting “/” just “foldername”

Simple Commands

cd = change directory E.g.

cd /home/username/Documents

mv = move files/folders E.g.

mv /home/username/Documents /home/username/

ls = List, similar to dir in command prompt will list the files and folders in the current directory

Whilst it may have taken two days to finally get sorted, the installation process was relatively painless. The main delay was that my first effort at suse 10.1 install hung whilst “initialising catalogues”, not knowing if it had hung or not at the time i left it overnight.

I’m not completely sure but i think this was to do with the mirror I chose to install from. I originally opted for the Kent UK mirror then after this hung, I chose the German mirror which worked fine, in fact the stage i left for 18 hours overnight only took about 3 minutes this time around!

The only thing to look out for is where they provide the mirror url’s during the install, you actually need the IP of the mirror and then the path during setup. Why they don’t just give you the details and save a lot of IP resolving and folder path copying I dont know.
I opted to do an online install to save me some CD burning time. Basically this involved downloading a boot disk ISO image from opensuse.org and burning it to CD (as a windows user with no fancy CD burning software I had to download and install ISO Recorder). Basically all that was needed was to pop in the CD and reboot my PC et voila! Linux install options ahoy.

A very thorough tutorial for performing an online install of Suse is available at opensuse.us.

In a previous post I discussed signing up for webhosting, since then I tried to sign up for some budget hosting with 1and1. I am aware of a lot of bad press for 1and1 but I didn’t have overly high requirements and I didn’t want to spend a lot. However, true to form there was a problem trying to pay them using a perfectly valid credit card.

So, instead of spending hours of my life on the phone to 1and1 I made the concerted effort to setup my own LAMP hosting environment. My old dev PC has had its day as a full time machine (I now rely mainly on my laptop) so after backing up the files I wanted to keep I selected a Linux Operating System and embarked my journey into the lands of the Linux.

The OS chosen was SUSE 10.1 this was as a result of previous reccomendation by our placement student who seems to know something about everything (which is pretty handy) and it appeared to be the choice of the developers of Red5 (more on what that is later).

My next couple of posts will be on my experiance of installing and familiarising myself with Linux SUSE 10.1 and hopefully will then get back on track with setting up the hosting environment.