Samuel's Tech Blog

I was upgrading to Ubuntu 11.10 the other day, after sticking to the pre-Unity, Ubuntu 10.10. Now I thought the Unity stuff would have gotten better, and sure it has, but still I couldn't stand it ... so, switched to Xubuntu (sudo apt-get install xubuntu-desktop), which uses XFCE as desktop environment instead of GNOME.

And after some tweaking ... Wow! ... so snappy, so beatiful, so fast, so consistent! just wow ... It's definitely my distro of choice from now on ...

Have to throw a screenshot at you (sorry, haven't got the Lightbox up working yet):

For your referece:

• As theme in "Settings > Appearance", use "MurrinaCrystal"
• In "Settings > Window Manager", use "Aqualemon"
• Install the Geany text editor (sudo apt-get install geany). gedit will look ugly in XFCE, but Geany just is so much more suited for development stuff anyway ... I just love it, too ...
• Do some tweaking of Geany
• Tweak the terminal a slight bit
• Install the Lucida Grande font, and make Lucida Grande, Regular, 9, be the default font in
  "Settings > Appearance > Fonts"
• And probably some minor tweak I forgot ...
• ... and you're there!

Install xmlstarlet in Ubuntu:

sudo apt-get install xmlstarlet

Use the formatting command:

[code that produces some xml] | xmlstarlet fo

... or, if you are generating the XML with an XSLT stylesheet, don't forget the following line, after the xsl:stylesheet tag:

<xsl:output method="xml" indent="yes" encoding="UTF-8" />

 I ran into some troubles with the debugging with XDebug in Eclipse for PHP Developers / PDT (breakpoints stopped to take / catch, after I changed location of my www folder - which I figured out later), so I wanted to document the full setup procedure it here. I mainly followed this blog post. (Assuming you have apache and php set up!).

• Download Eclipse for PHP developers
  • I'm using the Linux 32 bit version
  • Because of a bug with PDT for Eclipse Helios, I chose to go with Eclipse PDT SR2 for now.
• Install XDebug by typing:

 apt-get install php5-xdebug

• Edit /etc/php5/conf.d/xdebug.ini to look something like this:

 zend_extension=/usr/lib/php5/20090626+lfs/xdebug.so
 xdebug.remote_enable=On
 xdebug.remote_host="localhost"
 xdebug.remote_port=9000
 xdebug.remote_handler="dbgp"
 # xdebug.remote_log="/tmp/xdebug.log" 

• • The log line can be good to enable in case you run into troubles.
  • The first line can be different depending on PHP version. Use the line that you can find in the file (which is the default for your version of Ubuntu):

 /etc/php5/conf.d/xdebug.ini.ucf-dist

• Restart apache:

 sudo apache2ctl restart

Configure Eclipse

• Create a PHP Project. Mine is named "RDF4SMW".
• Choose Run > Debug Configurations in Eclipse
• Turn the configuration to your web server setup. For me, it looks like this ("smw" is the folder where MediaWiki is installed):

Custom location of www folder

Then an important thing If you have changed the location of your www folder from /var/www, then don't miss this! This was what caused the problem for me, with breakpoints not taking:

• Click the "Configure" button in the Debug configuration screen seen above
• Click the "Path mapping" tab
• Configure according to the location of your www folder. My current config looks like so: