You need:

• Enough space on hard drive
• Windows installation CD/DVD
• Linux/Ubuntu Live-CD/DVD (!!)
• Some time you like to waste on a Windows installation process

Instructions:

• Make sure you have enough free space on you hard disc.
• If you hadn’t install GParted, do it now.
• Make space for the Windows partition on you hard drive and create a new NTFS partition. The overview from GParted should somehow look similar to this (/dev/sda2 is my NTFS partition):
  

  GParted - partitions on hard drive

• Reboot you system, install Windows on the NEW partition on your hard drive (It is quite important to choose the right one, otherwise you Linux system could get lost). After the installation there is (currently) no way to boot you Linux system, since Windows has overwritten the Linux boot loader.
• Insert you Ubuntu/Linux Live CD / DVD and boot a Live system.
• Mount you Linux partition into you Live system. (Easiest way is: On main menu: “Places” -> “Name/size of Filesystem”
• Open a console/terminal
• Check if everything is correctly mounted and get the ID of you Linux partition. Enter:

  mount

  which should give you a line like this

  /dev/sda2 on /media/0d104aff-ec8c-44c8-b811-92b993823444 type ext4 (rw,nosuid,nodev,uhelper=devkit)

  Now run:

  ls /media/0d104aff-ec8c-44c8-b811-92b993823444/boot

  Replace 0d104aff-ec8c-44c8-b811-92b993823444 with the ID given by the mount command earlier. (Tip: Use <Tab>-Key to get autocompletion.)
  The result should be very close to this:

  config-2.6.18-3-686      initrd.img-2.6.18-3-686.bak  System.map-2.6.18-3-686
  grub                     lost+found                   vmlinuz-2.6.18-3-686
  initrd.img-2.6.18-3-686  memtest86+.bin

• Overwrite the master boot record and replace the Windows boot loader with GRUB: (again insert the correct ID for the partition and make sure you perform this on the right hard drive!)

  sudo grub-install --root-directory=/media/0d104aff-ec8c-44c8-b811-92b993823444 /dev/sda

• Grub automatically detects all the installed operating system. After a reboot you should be able to chose which operating system you want to boot.
• Done.

Tip: If you do not see the grub menu during boot, press and hold the Shift key before the boot process starts.

• Edit the .bashrc file from you home directory and append the following lines:
  1. alias alert_helper=‘history|tail -n1|sed -e "s/^\s*[0-9]\+\s*//" -e "s/;\s*alert$//"’
  2. alias alert=‘notify-send -i /usr/share/icons/gnome/32×32/apps/gnome-terminal.png "[$?] $(alert_helper)"’
• Install the libnotify-bin package

  sudo apt-get install libnotify-bin

• If you do not want to restart execute the next command in a console:

  source ~/.bashrc

Now you have a new command available on your console: alert
If you do something time consuming now add the additional alert after the last command and you will get a nice notification:

notification from the console

Today I tried the same with my Ubuntu 10.04 installation and I encountered a few problems. This is how I got my webcam working with Skype:

• Check if your web cam is working in general. The program Cheese is quite suitable for this task.
• Test if Skype works with you cam. Open the options dialogue, go to “Video” and click test. If you see yourself, everything is fine
• Otherwise create a shell script with the following content:
  1. #!/bin/bash
  2. LD_PRELOAD=/usr/lib/libv4l/v4l1compat.so  /usr/bin/skype

  This script forces Skype to use the Video4Linux drivers instead of the native ones.

• If you got this error like this:
  

  X Error, request 132, minor 18, error code 8 BadMatch (invalid parameter attributes)

  Modify you script this way:

  1. #!/bin/bash
  2. export XLIB_SKIP_ARGB_VISUALS=1 skype
  3. LD_PRELOAD=/usr/lib/libv4l/v4l1compat.so  /usr/bin/skype
• Whenever you start Skype and want to use your web cam use this script to start Skype.

P.S.: If you are on a 64bit system you probably need to do this:

It took a while to get everything running and I pulled all the information I needed from many different sites. So pulled them all together in this blog entry:

1. Register at the VMware page. Download the package for VMware server as *.tar.gz. Extract the archive.
2. Current VMware products do not support the Linux kernel 2.6.32. Therefor you need a patch for the installation archive. Download the patch from the following link and extract it in the parent folder of you VMware download: VMware patch for Linux kernel 2.6.32. More information could found on this page and pages linked on this page.
3. Run the script with super-user rights. It is quite simple to install. Most of the times you could just hit enter for every question of the installer. At one point the installer ask for a system user which runs the Vmware instances. If you leave it at the default choice, root will be the user. Make sure you have password to log in as root user. (You can set a root password by running the following command on a terminal:
   

   sudo passwd root

4. If you are running a new Ubuntu system you might have get a Firefox version >= 3.6. In these versions the VMware console plugin for the browser won’t work, so download a older version of Firefox from this page (3.5.9 should be highest working version number).
   Extract it somewhere and run it:

   ./firefox -no-remote -P

   You might create a new Firefox profile (-P) and make sure a new instance of the Firefox is starting (-no-remote)

5. On a few guest operating systems you might have some trouble with some of the arrow keys of you keyboard. To get them working run this command from a terminal:
   

   sudo echo “xkeymap.nokeycodeMap = true” >> /etc/vmware/config

   You need to run this on the computer where you want to start the VMware console. More Informations could be found here.

6. Browse to you VMware administration panel (http://localhost:8222 or https://localhost:8333). Create and start a virtual machine. Install the browser plug-in. Launch the console.

VMware admin & console

It seems that keeping up the the apache mpm_prefork and mod_php will not be the solution anymore. Most sites suggested to use mpm_worker instead, because it uses less memory (and my problem was, that my Apache consumed all my memory). On the other hand there could be some problems with thread-safety, but I liked to give it a try. PHP will not me used as an Apache module any more. Instead we will run PHP as a FastCGI script.

A short step by step tutorial for switching from mpm_prefork to mpm_worker with using PHP.

• Open a terminal session as a root user.

  apt-get install apache2-mpm-worker libapache2-mod-fcgid php5-cgi

  apt will complain about a few things and will remove some of the previous installed packages. After installation make sure that mod_fcgid is enabled.

• Edit you /etc/apache2/apache2.conf or /etc/apache2/httpd.conf or any config file that will be parsed by apache and add this:
  1. AddHandler fcgid-script .php
  2. FCGIWrapper /usr/lib/cgi-bin/php5 .php
  3. Options ExecCGI FollowSymlinks Indexes
• Now enter you /etc/apache2/sites-available directory and edit all the the files there. Every file should contain at least one “VirtualHost” node. Within these “VirtualHost” nodes there should be one or two “Directory” nodes. If not already there add a new line starting with “Options” and add “Indexes” and “ExecCGI” as parameters on these lines. It should be look like this one:
  1. Options Indexes FollowSymLinks MultiViews ExecCGI
  2. AllowOverride AuthConfig
  3. Order allow,deny
  4. allow from all
• Restart apache:

  /etc/init.d/apache2 restart

Hopefully now everything should work as before. If you had enabled eAccelerator or any other byte code cache system or if you had mode some modifications on you php.ini you now have to copy them to your “new” php.ini located at /etc/php5/cgi/php.ini

A few things wont work as before, e.g. when use user authentication by PHP and not by htaccess. There are also a few issues I read about, but nothing which affect my sites.

As a result I would say spending this hours messing around with Apache and mod_fcgid was a good investment. My server now need only 90 MB Ram when idle, it was 250 MB Ram before. Even under load memory consumption stays lower as before. I hope this will be the last tweak for I longer time.

Using PHP as a FastCGI script gives you a lot of new options. So if you have a lot of time to spent or very worried about the security of you web server you could use the Apache module suexec which then could execute the script as a special user and not as the default web server user www-data. It could even use multiple user for each virtual host / directory.

Interesting links:

• http://brian.moonspot.net/2008/02/13/apache-worker-and-php/
• http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/linux/library/l-tune-lamp-2.html Tuning Apache and PHP
• http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/library/l-tune-lamp-3.html Tuning MySQL
• http://ivan.gudangbaca.com/installing_apache2_and_php5_using_mod_fcgid More detailed instruction how to install mpm_worker and PHP via mod_fcgid

PHP is not the fastest scripting language, that truly a fact. Except from optimizing the scripts there a few possibilities to speed everything up. One is to install a byte code optimizer and cache on your server. They cache the byte code created by the PHP parser and try to optimise it. So every time some one requests for a page on your server the script does not have to be parsed again. This brings a speedup of 120 – 250% depending on you script. There are several byte code caching program available, the one I like most is eAccelerator. Sadly eAccelerator is not available through the Ubuntu repositories so you have install them yourself. Here is a short description how to archive this!
Everything is done from the terminal as a root user.

• Prepare you system for compiling a PHP extension:

  apt-get install build-essential php5-dev

• Choosing a folder for build process. I used “/usr/local/src/”
• Getting the sources from the eAccelerator site:

  wget http://bart.eaccelerator.net/source/0.9.5.3/eaccelerator-0.9.5.3.zip

• Extract and delete the archive

  unzip eaccelerator-0.9.5.3.zip && rm eaccelerator-0.9.5.3.zip

• Enter the folder

  cd eaccelerator-0.9.5.3

• Prepare as a new PHP extension and compilation

  phpize
  ./configure --enable-eaccelerator=shared

• Compile and install

  make
  make install

  The install process prints out a folder where eAccelerator has been installed. Remember or copy it, you will need this later.

• Enabling eAcceletor: Editing your “php.ini” or create a new ini file in you conf.d directory of PHP. (You can find them here: “/etc/php5/”.) Insert the following:

  zend_extension                  = "/usr/lib/php5/20060613+lfs/eaccelerator.so"
  eaccelerator.shm_size           = "0"
  eaccelerator.cache_dir          = "/var/cache/eaccelerator"
  eaccelerator.enable             = "1"
  eaccelerator.optimizer          = "1"
  eaccelerator.check_mtime        = "1"
  eaccelerator.debug              = "0"
  eaccelerator.filter             = ""
  eaccelerator.shm_max            = "0"
  eaccelerator.shm_ttl            = "0"
  eaccelerator.shm_prune_period   = "0"
  eaccelerator.shm_only           = "0"
  eaccelerator.compress           = "1"
  eaccelerator.compress_level     = "7"
  eaccelerator.allowed_admin_path = "/var/www/eaccelerator"

  In the first line enter the path printed out during the install. In the last line you could enter a directory for the eAccelerator admin tool, if you want to use it.

• Create the cache directory:

  mkdir /var/cache/eaccelerator
  chown www-data.www-data /var/cache/eaccelerator

• Restart you Apache!

  /etc/init.d/apache2 restart

There are a lot of setting in the ini file. The whole list and the description of them could be found here:  Ini-settings.

To check if everything is working open up a page on the server that contains the “phpinfo();” command. There should be some thing like this:

eAccelerator

Enjoy the speed!