Archive for CentOS
Have you ever seen a bunch of ^M characters in a text file? This odd character at the end of a line can also be represented as a Ctrl+M or <CTRL>M. You don’t know what it is, and you want it to go away.
Today, I’ll help you understand what that odd ^M character is, why it is in some of your documents, and how to get rid of them.
Continue reading “Convert DOS-Formatted Files to Unix-Format in Ubuntu and CentOS”
You just got your new CentOS dedicated server, and you notice that times in your logs aren’t quite right. You check the time from the command line (run “date”), and find that the timezone is set to US Eastern or some other timezone. How do you get this changed?
Unfortunately, this is not an easy thing to figure out. Fortunately though, it’s not hard to do with the right directions.
Sorry about the late post everyone. I had a long week and went to bed before making sure a post was queued. Hopefully you’ll forgive me. 
I’m working on a project where I needed to generate a MIME type given a file name. Not only did I need to create a solution that worked, I also needed the solution to be compatible with PHP 4/5 and not require any additional software to be installed on the host. I thought this would be a simple matter of finding a PHP function that does this. Unfortunately, things were not as simple as this.
Yesterday, I talked about how to get the most out of running regular expressions in PHP. The reason that I needed to dig in deep on regular expression syntax with PHP is because I needed to write some regular expressions that deal with Unicode characters.
After much reading, I believed that I knew everything that I needed. I started writing some regex strings and testing the code. Unfortunately, every time I ran a test with a string that contained Unicode characters, the match failed. When I removed the Unicode characters from the string and tested again, it would work. I was baffled.
Continue reading “Unicode Support on CentOS 5.2 with PHP and PCRE”
This is going to turn into another one of my “I love package management” posts. When I first starting managing Linux servers with Apache, adding a new module to Apache required going back to the source code, remembering the configure parameters you compiled Apache with last time, configuring Apache again with the same parameters plus whatever changes need to be made, compiling, testing, and then installing. It took hours. Now, it takes a few minutes to add something like mod_ssl support to Apache without having to compile anything.
FFmpeg is an amazing collection of open-source tools that can record and stream video and audio. However, it can also transcode video and audio (convert the files to different formats), and that is what has me so excited. There’s also a great PHP package called ffmpeg-php that allows for easy use of FFmpeg from inside PHP scripts. Today, I’m going to see if I can’t help you get both of these set up on your system.
Admittedly, it’s been a while since I’ve tried to install FFmpeg, about two years. I recently thought up some ideas on how I’d like to use FFmpeg, so I thought it was time to give it a try yet again. Today, I’m proud to say that installing FFmpeg is so much easier to install compared to the past, that I dare say it’s simple.
Here is my experience with installing FFmpeg on my server and how to fix the pitfalls that I encountered.
Continue reading “Install FFmpeg and ffmpeg-php on CentOS Easily”
Today I’m installing Ubersmith, a billing system solution, on a server to test it out. I have to say that Ubersmith has a more complex installation process than I’m used to these days. I guess that I’ve been spoiled.
Here’s a quick word about what I’m running. My test server is a dedicated system running CentOS 5.2 64-bit. The software setup is nothing special as most of the packages are straight from the repository.
I loaded the release files on the server, untarred them, and proceeded to read the instructions. Everything looked to be straight-forward. I quickly got down to the part about installing Ioncube. That’s when the trouble started.
Continue reading “Trouble with Ubersmith, Ioncube, and mb_internal_encoding”
I’ve poked around with some distros over the last few days. They’ve all been Live Distros running in VMWare. Some of the Distros ran very well like this (Fedora, Mandriva, openSUSE, and Ubuntu), but others failed miserably in one way or another (Linux Mint, Sabayon). Unfortunately, CentOS cannot be installed from a Live CD, so I was unable to test out its installer in VMWare.
As I talked about in my Time to Switch to Linux post, I’m ready to finally migrate away from Windows and into Linux. The biggest question for me is which Distro do I want to start with. Me being a lover of lists, I have a few criteria that I want the Distro that I select to meet: