For my own sanity I'm blogging this, since every time I have to do it I end up jumping through the same hoops and cursing myself for not blogging it!

I have a USB external drive on one of my machines. I want it shared across the network. It's an old Windows drive formatted as NTFS. Here are the steps:

1. On the "server" install required services and applications. As root:

FUSE should be there already, but just in case. The GUI for ntfs-3g is optional.

2. Make sure the NFS services is enabled and loads on boot:

So, last night I lost not inconsiderable amounts of time and sleep to a Vodafone Italy 3G USB key. Trying to get these things set up is supposed to be fairly straightforward, however the end-to-end process is not really documented anywhere, as far as I can tell. Maybe for individual devices, but not in any generic way.

Since this is the second time I've done this now, and in both cases it was a pain in the ass, I am documenting some generic steps so I don't forget what I need to do all over again!

Ok, so this is *purely* for my memory, a kind of bookmark. But VPS.NET, the hosting company I often use for virtual machines, does free SSL certificates for all customers:
http://www.vps.net/forum/public-forums/announcements/233-free-and-unlimi...

Here's how you get one and configure it. (Using the VPS.NET Centos 5.4 64 bit LAMP image, and with ISPmanager Pro - also free from VPS.NET - as the server control panel. This is my usual set-up.)

• Set up your VM in the usual way

Note: Apparently it works fine with Windows too! See comments.

I'm pretty excited right now. I just tried drush make for the first time. Download it here:
http://drupal.org/project/drush_make

That's an order! You'll need drush too, if you don't have it yet (in which case, shame on you ... call yourself a Drupal developer?!)
http://drupal.org/project/drush

Here's another one of my little Linux admin scripts for all you Drupal developers out there. It's a Linux shell script requiring Drush, MySQL and Subversion, but could be easily modified to work with other databases and repositories and should work fine on a Mac, I think.

Those familiar with Windows (and I guess Mac OSX too) will probably be aware that you can get an é character from your keyboard by pressing AltGr + E. You may not be aware that in Linux you can't. This was a bit of a problem for me, as I live in France, a country who's native language relies rather heavily on the accents in the special character set. For example, the town I'm in is called Uzès and my daughter is called Moïra. It's also been driving my wife bananas, since she actually needs to write emails and letters in French but we have British keyboard layouts.

Quick post today, no politics *whatsoever*. ;-)

I just wrote another little batch script for deploying my Drupal sites from local to stage. Before I post the code, here's the workflow here in our office at CMS Professionals:

• Code is stored in Subversion away on the Internet (svn.cmspros.co.uk)
• Each developer has a working copy on their laptop
• Database during development is held on central (dedicated) CentOS/MySQL machine on our office LAN

A few weeks ago I wrote a post about how to bring a stock CentOS 5 server up to spec to run Drupal 6. It seems only fair I do the same for Debian and Ubuntu, since it seems they too are not without their little issues when a stock install. This quick post was written after configuring a server running Ubuntu 8.04.2 (or Hardy Heron, as it was codenamed).

The first (and main) problem with a stock Debian install is it does not include the necessary GD support for manipulating images. There is a long internal squabble in the Debian ticketing system here:

This is more a bookmark for my reference than anything, but if you have a stock CentOS 5.x installation (maybe from a VPS image or a clean install on a dedicated box) you're going to have issues with Drupal 6.x.

It comes down to PHP version. It ships with PHP 5.1.6 and Drupal these days pretty much depends on PHP 5.2.x upwards to work. Utilities like Drush do too, so leaving PHP as it is, you'll find, is not really an option. To confirm you will have this problem, execute this command to check your PHP version:

Ok, here I am at DrupalCon Paris blogging about Linux. WTF? Sorry, sorry, but I'm blogging this before I forget how I did it.

Note: This is written with Fedora 10 and Gnome. Apparently KDE has a desktop zoom feature which sounds like it achieves the same thing more easily. Although this is Fedora 10, I guess it should work for any Gnome desktop.

If you have a small-screened laptop or netbook (in my case, an EEE PC 901) and you want to "zoom out" your desktop and applications but can't go to a larger screen resolution, what do you do? With Gnome it's a two step process: