I tried inte­grat­ing XMonad using the “rec­om­mended” way of set­ting up a gdm desk­top pro­file to call a cus­tom xmonad.start script which man­u­ally loads Gnome and then starts XMonad. I didn’t get very far. Here’s what finally worked.

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On Ubuntu 8.10, I ran into a bit of prob­lem. The Apache web server was work­ing fine, but the fol­low­ing commands:

sudo apt-get install php5 libapache-mod-php5
sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart

failed to work after cre­at­ing a phpinfo.php file in the /var/www/ root folder. Fire­fox com­plained, “You have cho­sen to open phpinfo.php which is a: PHP file.” Apache was not using the PHP pre­proces­sor for some rea­son. A bunch of forum posts and blogs said to edit either /etc/apache2/httpd.conf or /etc/apache2/apache2.conf in order to asso­ciate the PHP mime type with the file exten­sion. That wouldn’t work because I had also installed php­myad­min which has an apache.conf file that already has an AddType direc­tive. So, after some dig­ging around, it turns out the mod­ule wasn’t even being loaded, even though that’s what you’d expect the pack­age man­ager to han­dle when you tell it to install the mod­ule. Any how, to fix the prob­lem, just cre­ate sym­bolic links to the php5.load and php5.conf files in the /etc/apache2/mods-enabled/ folder.

sudo ln -s /etc/apache2/mods-available/php5.load /etc/apache2/mods-enabled/php5.load
sudo ln -s /etc/apache2/mods-available/php5.conf /etc/apache2/mods-enabled/php5.conf
sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart

Update: Debian-based installs of Apache2 have some handy com­mand line utils for man­ag­ing the web server. So to enable a mod, which auto­mates the above, do this instead:

sudo a2enmod php5

a2dismod is the com­mand for dis­abling a mod. For sites, there is also a2ensite and a2dissite.

The last cou­ple of week­ends I tin­kered with the gOS 2.0 beta. It def­i­nitely looks bet­ter than the pre­vi­ous iter­a­tion. The gianor­mous icons were just way too big for a res­o­lu­tion of 1024×768. This will def­i­nitely make a more appeal­ing inter­net appli­ance for my guests than my pre­vi­ous box. To make it login auto­mat­i­cally as a guest user took a bit of work, though, since this capa­bil­ity was not part of the ini­tial install.

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My DeLi Linux computer’s main appli­ca­tion is an inter­net access “kiosk” for guests who stay at my house. To this end I needed the machine to auto­mat­i­cally login the guest user and launch Firefox.

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