Peter Vatistas

More and more people are emailing me, annoyed at popup windows in Firefox that cannot resize and are the wrong dimension (this becomes an issue when you can’t see a damn thing!). It never really bothered me until today when I visited 2 websites where this issue occurred and I was forced to use IE7 to see the popup. So, here is the solution:

1. In Firefox, type about:config in the address bar.
2. Scroll down to dom.disable_window_open_feature.resizable and double-click it (changes to bold and value changes to true.)
3. Done. Just restart Firefox and have endless ability to resize all popup windows. Wow.

Now here is a common issue I see all the time for many Ubuntu laptop users. After installing Ubuntu 7.10 Gutsy Gibbon on a laptop the ability to control the volume using the laptop’s keyboard keys does not work (often times).

To fix this you’ll need to determine the device’s track the volume is actually adjusted on; by default I notice this is set to headphone and from my experience the correct one usually is PCM.

Open the volume control and press the volume up/down buttons to see which level moves. Once you’ve found the correct track (whether is be PCM or PCM2) you need to set it from within the sound preferences menu.

Go to system > preferences > sound and look at the bottom of the device tab. Select the correct track here and test; everything should now work properly.

A few days ago I installed OS X Leopard on two different PC’s, a Compaq laptop and a SuperMicro Dual Quad-Core Xeon powerhouse with 8GB ram. Both machines run OS X Leopard perfectly and the installation process was just as straightforward and easy as installing OS X on a Mac, only a few extra steps!

So how did I install OS X Leopard on my PC? Simple: iATKOS v1.0i

Do a quick search using your favorite torrent search portal for “iATKOS v1.0i” , download it, burn to DVD, pop that puppy into your test computer’s DVD drive and reboot**. During the install process there are a few extra steps so I will list what you need to do below:

# When the Welcome screen pops up click Continue

1. At the Terms & Conditions screen do not click Agree yet, click Utilities on the Apple bar at the top of your screen and then select Disk Utility from the drop down menu (Utilities > Disk Utility).

2. Select your hard drive’s partition on the left hand side then select the Erase tab on the right.

3. Now click the Erase button on the bottom right and click Erase again on the pop-up. When this is complete close the Disk Utility.

4. Now go back up to the Apple menu bar and select Utilities > Darwin_Boot

5. Type Y (yes) to continue, 1 for your HDD number (if your using the main HDD), and 1 again for the partition number OS X will be installed on (if your installing on a different partition enter that partition number instead of 1).

6. Type Y (yes) to install boot efi and type Y (yes) again to confirm. Once it this process in complete it will display [process completed] and you can now exit out of Darwin_boot.

7. Please read the Terms & Conditions for iATKOS v1.0i and click Agree (if you agree).

8. Now your ready to install OS X Leopard on your PC, just follow the on screen guide and your good to go!

Best of luck!

** I will not be held liable for any damage that results from this tutorial. If you attempt to install OS X Leopard (iATKOS v1.0i) onto your computer it is at your own risk.

UPDATE (June 19th, 2008): For your questions and/or comments go to the Peter-V Forum and post here: How to Install OS X Leopard on a PC - iATKOS v1.0i Tutorial - Forum Style

This is actually quite a simple task yet I’ve received several emails recently about how to burn an ISO to disc in Leopard OS X. I totally understand the reason for this question from the general OS X user because to do this you have to know the tool to use and normally it is used by the intermediate/advanced user.

So, how do you burn an .iso image to a CD or DVD in OS X?

Insert the CD/DVD into your Mac, locate your .ISO image and follow these very easy steps:

Go to Finder > Applications > Utilities and run Disk Utility (Disk Utility.app)

In Disk Utility, go to File > Open Disk Image and select the .ISO you want to burn to disc

Now click Burn

Thats it! Now you should see a little box pop up with the status of your ISO image being written to the disc.

Here it is, the meat and potatoes of setting up a FAMP server (FreeBSD 6.3, Apache, MySQL, PHP/Perl). Keep in mind these instructions are exactly what I do step by step to setup a FreeBSD webserver. Originally when I started with FreeBSD I couldn’t find a solid source of reliable information on how to set all this up. Every time I would ask someone for some good instruction I was always directed to www.freebsd.org. I have to tell you it is extremely overwhelming for me at that time to even understand anything off of that site’s directions - as well written as it is.
Over the last few years I have come across some decent walkthroughs and tutorials but 90% of them were still either out dated or lacking 1 or 2 steps that can really jack things up. I have really tried to make this tutorial as straight forward as possible, no BS and no info that’s going to waste your time.

Before I install anything I always make sure I have the latest release of FreeBSD installed with the Developer distribution. Many tutorials out there tell you to install the bare minimum of FreeBSD with the “Minimum” distro, I recommend Developer. If you need a good step by step on how to install FreeBSD (6.2 & 6.3) then click here. Remember, instead of selecting the minimal option on the Distributions screen, choose Developer.

Once you have FreeBSD installed the steps below will show you how to setup and configure a full FAMP server. Good luck!

# cd /usr/ports/lang/php5
# make config
select: Apache
# make install

# cd /usr/ports/lang/php5-extensions
# make config
select: bcmath, bz2, ctype, curl, dom, ftp, gd, gettext, mbstring, mysql, pcre, posix, pdo, session, simplexml, sqlite, xml, zlib (also by default there are many options pre-selected including some of the ones listed here, make sure to leave those checked).
# make install

Usually after everything is done you will notice a few mysql errors appear, run this command:

# pkg_add -r mysql50-server

Now before editing any file on my system I always make a backup of it:
# cp /usr/local/etc/apache/httpd.conf /usr/local/etc/apache/httpd.conf.orig

Now let’s edit your Apache config file to get everything configured properly:
# edit /usr/local/etc/apache/httpd.conf

Change the default listen address to the IP address of your webserver.

#Listen 12.34.56.78:80
To:
#Listen 192.168.1.10:80 (example, use your machines IP Address)

Change the email address of the ServerAdmin to your email address or the address of the person in charge on this server:

#ServerAdmin you@your.address (use your email address)

Change the ServerName option, if you don’t have a fully qualified domain name please change this to the servers IP address:

#ServerName www.example.com
To:
#ServerName 192.168.1.10 (example, use your machines IP Address - for internal, intranet implementations)
Or:
#ServerName www.peter-v.com (example, use your domain name if you have one and your going to point DNS to that machine)

# Add a DirectoryIndex option:
DirectoryIndex index.php index.html index.htm index.php3 index.php4

# In the AddType section add the following for PHP:
AddType application/x-httpd-php .php .htm .html
AddType application/x-httpd-php-source .phps

Now exit and save, your all done with Apache.

# echo ‘/usr/local/sbin/apachectl start’ >> /etc/rc.local

Now let’s configure MySQL:

# cp /usr/local/share/mysql/my-medium.cnf /etc/my.cnf
# echo ‘mysql_enable=”YES”‘ >> /etc/rc.conf

# /usr/local/bin/mysql_install_db
# chown -R mysql:mysql /var/db/mysql
# /usr/local/share/mysql/mysql.server start

If the command: # /usr/local/share/mysql/mysql.server start doesn’t work or fails, try this command:
# /usr/local/etc/rc.d/mysql-server.sh start

# /usr/local/bin/mysqladmin -u root -h Hostname.domainname.tld password ‘YourPassword’
# /usr/local/bin/mysqladmin -u root password ‘YourPassword’

Example:

# /usr/local/bin/mysqladmin -u root -h webserver.peter-v.com password ’secret’
# /usr/local/bin/mysqladmin -u root password ’secret’

Now let’s install Perl DBI and DBD Support (which many apps need that run using Apache and MySQL):

# cd /usr/ports/databases/p5-DBI && make install && make clean
# cd /usr/ports/databases/p5-DBD-mysql50 && make install && make clean

Reboot.

That’s it, your all done and now you’ve got yourself a FAMP Webserver.

Tips:

If at anytime in this tutorial a command doesn’t work, try rebooting first. Sometimes after installing certain applications or components it is required to reboot before being able to utilize it. After a quick reboot it always works.

I would love to hear your comments and if you have any suggestions or issues with this tutorial please leave a comment, thanks!