Affiliates
Use The Chrome OS Start Page
The web has been abuzz this week with the news that Google has released an early version of their new Chrome OS. This early version is actually the open source Chromium OS. If you really want to get a feel for this new operating system, you can follow the directions on the Chromium OS site to compile and build the OS to make your own flash drive image or VMware image. I was unable to get my VMware image running, but my flash drive image does work.
Chromium OS is basically a minimal installation of Ubuntu 9.10 - Karmic Koala with a custom version of the Chromium browser running on top. Chromium uses a web based application start page that is hosted at http://welcome-cros.appspot.com/menu. That page is currently blank for non-Chromium OS users. The good news is that the site just checks your browser user agent string to decide whether or not to show you the content.
Your web browser needs to use the following user agent to see the correct start page.
If you're using Firefox you can use the User Agent Switcher add-on. Then, just go into the settings to add a new user agent and paste the above string into the menu.
If you want to get the most authentic simulation, use Chromium on Linux as your browser. There is no plug-in to change the Chromium user agent, but you can launch Chromium from a terminal with the -user-agent command line switch. Use the following command to launch Chromium on Linux with the Chrome OS user agent string.
chromium-browser -user-agent="Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; CrOS i686 9.10; en-US) AppleWebKit/532.5 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/4.0.253.0 Safari/532.5"If you've gotten the latest update from the PPA, it looks like the application name has now changed to Google Chrome. In that case, launch it with this command.
google-chrome -user-agent="Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; CrOS i686 9.10; en-US) AppleWebKit/532.5 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/4.0.253.0 Safari/532.5"Then point your browser to http://welcome-cros.appspot.com/menu to see the Application Start Page. You'll need to be logged in to a Google account to use the Google specific applications.
You can click here to view your current browser user agent.
Chrome OS Applications
How To Install WordPress on Ubuntu: Part 2
In Part 1 of How To Install WordPress on Ubuntu I showed you some of the steps required to get Ubuntu ready for a fresh installation of WordPress to use for web development. In Part 2 I'll go through the steps of installing WordPress itself.
First, you need to download the latest version of WordPress. As of this writing, the latest is version 2.8.6.
Extract the archive to your intended directory. In my case, I'm putting the files into ~/webdev/site1. This will create a wordpress sub-directory. Cut all of the files from the wordpress directory and paste them into the parent directory (~/webdev/site1). Go ahead and delete the wordpress directory, you don't need it any more. If you have an index.html file, delete it or rename it to something like index.html.bak.
Now you'll need to create a new mySQL database for WordPress to use. This is easy to do through phpMyAdmin. Enter http://localhost/phpmyadmin/ into your web browser address bar and log in to phpMyAdmin as root.
phpMyAdmin Home Page
Next, we're going to create a new user and database.
- Click on the Privileges tab in phpMyAdmin.
- Within this tab, click on Add a new user.
- Enter a user name and password in the required fields.
- Click the radio button for Create database with same name and grant all privileges.
- Finally, hit the Go button at the bottom of the page.
Create a new db and user
Site1 user and database created
You're now ready to start the WordPress installation. Point your browser to your new website (http://site1/ in my case).
WordPress install step 1
- Click on Create a Configuration File.
- You'll see a page describing the upcoming steps. Click on Let's go!
WordPress install step 2
- Enter the database name, user name, and password that you created earlier.
- Change the database prefix if you prefer.
WordPress install step 3
- Click Submit.
- You'll see a page saying WordPress is able to talk to your database.
WordPress install step 4
Click on Run the install.
- WordPress will ask for a blog title and email address. Enter what you want at this step. You can enter any email address, it doesn't really matter for a local install. You can also uncheck the box for allowing search engines to crawl your site. This is a local installation, so they can't see your site anyway.
WordPress install step 5
Click on Install WordPress.
- If the install worked, you should see a page showing the username admin and a randomly generated password.
WordPress install step 6
Write down the password and click the Log In button.
- Log in to WordPress.
- Click the red link at the top that says Yes, Take me to my profile page.
WordPress install step 7
- Enter a new password that you can remember and click Update Profile.
- Click on Visit Site in the upper left corner of the Dashboard.
WordPress install complete
Congratulations! You've just installed WordPress on Ubuntu.