I ran into great difficulties getting MySQL to work with the Konsole on Mandriva. I stayed up untill about 5am last night trying to get it to work to no avail. Finally this evening I hit a break through. After trauling through forums last night I found no answers – just millions of people asking the same question so I hope to answer it here!

Method 1

This method is recommended all over the internet and i’m sure it does work – but with a great work around. I spent a lot of time trying to get this to work and I couldn’t so I reverted to method 2 below. I strongly recommend trying method 2 because it simply just works! If anyone can point out what I’m doing wrong here please let me know.

Assuming that you have urpmi installed type the following:

urpmi mysql

Blah Blah Blah and it is installed. Now lets enter mysql.

mysql -u root -p
Enter Password:
ERROR 2002 (HY000): Can't connect to local MySQL server through socket '/var/lib/mysql/mysql.sock' (2)

No! I have got the infamous error 2002! I spent so long trying to fix this error and in the end I estabalished that the mysql.sock file was simply never created. I could go on and list all the solutions that I tried that don’t work but at this point I think the best thing for you to do at this point is to uninstall.

urpme mysql

Good all’s good and now lets revert to method number 2 which actually does work without much trouble.

Method 2

Now this method is easy and will take no longer than five minutes. We are going to install a package called XAMPP which contains Apache 2.2.9, MySQL 5.0.67, PHP 5.2.6 and phpmyadmin among others. It is very usefull. To download just type:

wget http://kent.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/xampp/xampp-linux-1.5.5a.tar.gz

Then to install:

tar xvfz xampp-linux-1.5.5a.tar.gz -C /opt

It should now be installed – simple as that! To start XAMPP:

/opt/lampp/lampp start
Starting XAMPP 1.5.5a…
LAMPP: Starting Apache…
LAMPP: Starting MySQL…
LAMPP started.

Now that it is started type http://localhost in your browser and there you go!

Now you have XAMPP working which has phpmyadmin which you can use for mysql. If you would rather have MySQL in a CLI (like me) then you can simply follow the instructions below.

MySQL will not work initially because you need to locate the mysql.sock file. To gain immediate access just type:

mysql -u root --socket=/opt/lampp/var/mysql/mysql.sock

Brilliant its working ! This is only a temporary fix however because you don’t want to have to type in the socket location every time. To set the socket location permenantly to the new location do the following:

vim /etc/my.cnf/

This will open up the documet. Type “i” to get into insertion mode (to edit the text). There are two sections here that you need to edit – client and mysqld. They both have a socket location, if you replace both of those locations with the new one (/opt/lampp/var/mysql/mysql.sock) it should do the job. Press escape to exit insertion mode and press “:wq” to exit and save. Now your MySQL should work by just typing:

mysql -u root -p

Hopefully that works for you, it did for me. As I said earlier I couldn’t find any decent solution online. If you see any problems with what I have written just let me know!

Microsoft Internet Explorer 6 – The bain of every web developers life.

As I have mentioned before I recently developed a site for The Strats. I knew while making this website that it would not support ie6, but I carried on regardless because I thought that it was out of date. Apparently not. Once the site was completed I got ‘the piss ripped out of me’ by people reviewing the site simply because of its lack of ie6 support. Basically i would have to completely re-design the site just to support this one browser… which I am frankly not prepared to do! Thankfully I found a JavaScript library that makes IE6 appear to have near native png support, but why bother?

If you are not aware of ie6 and its terrible over all performance then I have listed some of the facts for you.
1. IE6 was released in 2001. When it was released it failed to comply with at the time modern style rules, and is still behind in how to implement CSS 2.0.
2. IE6 is very unsecure, loads of bugs were found when it was released, and many of them have still not been patched. Here is a nice site that lists all of the bug fixes that they had to make for IE7: Feature Changes for IE7.

The main point that concerns web developers is the lack of compatibility with CSS style rules. This does have a massive affect on the amount of work that has to be done to display a webpage properly. In most websites you can see multipal stylesheets being used, usually a stylesheet specifically for IE6. Also to fix most of the problems with the browser people have written hacks. It makes you wonder once again, why bother?

I also have a list of the best IE6 hate sites… just in case you get a bit carried away and decide to get involved!
1. 100 reasons to hate IE6.
2. 6 Reasons why IE6 must die.
3. Dear IE6, i hate you.
4. 50 reasons to club IE6 to death.
5. Trash all IE6 hacks.
6. I hate IE6 Dot Com
7. Free the web.

I understand that IE6 is technically not yet out of date. About 42% of people use IE7, with its percentage growing slowly. About 32% use IE6, with its percentage decreasing slowly as users switch to IE7 and other browsers. The fact is that IE6 is still used by a greater percentage of people than that using firefox. In the end of the day I have concluded that a web developer is payed to do their job, which is to make a website that works. It is not up to us, as developers, to decide what we should support, we should go with the flow. Who wants to hear all these developers moaning (I’m soo contradicting myself here!) about IE6. We are getting paid, it’s not the end of the world!

Heres a link that I agree with! Stop being a dick, support IE6.

Then when I thought that I had this post all done and wrapped up…. I saw this statement that made my day! I have just taken the key point out of the article, to see it in full go to: Internet Explorer 6 – Wikipedia

“IE6 will be phased out completely in early January 2009”

I cant wait… Only two months and we can forget about IE6!

Yeaterday I met a guy browsing the Linux magazines in easons. We started talking about Linux and he highly recomended Mandriva. I had been using Fedora for a month at that stage and to be honest I didn’t think that much of it. The man managed to convince me to buy the Linux Format magazine which included a live version of Mandriva.

When I got home I stuck in the CD, not expecting much since I was disapointed with both Fedora and Ubuntu. Oh My God it is brilliant!! Mandriva is the best operating system that I have ever stumbled upon! Absolutly brilliant! It combines all the good visual aspects of Microsoft’s Window Vista and the good old back end of Linux! The graphical ‘flowing’ widgets and the availability to completly customise everything visually creates a great user friendly (and more importandly Windows user friendly) interface.

So I set about getting rid of Fedora. I only had 12 GB hard drive space reserved for Fedora but I was so impressed by Mandriva that I managed to clear 34 GB for it! The OS is now installed and almost fully functional.

I have to say I am surprised that a Linux distribution has finally achieved what I have been waiting for. The things that I want in Linux are finally available, which are:

• The graphical, ease of use, user friendly aspects of a Windows distribution. Mandriva in my opinion has achieved this, and to my great suprise it has out-done any Windows OS that I have ever used in this section in particular.
• No Viruses. This has allways been available – but without the other points it means nothing.
• The ability to code properly, I have learned the hard way that this isn’t possible on Windows.
• Oh and everything is easy! Like MySQL for example, i found it impossible to set it up on Windows without using PHP MyAdmin.

Over all i think Mandriva is brilliant and I cant wait to get it working properly. The only one problem that I did find with it is that my 02 3G modem won’t work properly on it. I have found some articles to hack the config files, which I intent to do as soon as I find out how to log in as root!!! oh it will all work eventually…

Just to note I got The Strats website up at http://www.thestrats.com please check it out and give me a review here or preferably at http://www.webdesignforum.com/5904-review-my-new-site.html#post22842

I started and finished work on a computer game today. Gavin Mc Bride handed me a copy of scratch the other day and I decided to have a go! Scratch is a program based on Java, at least it has the same structure, but a nice graphical interface.

The game called “Siopa Geansaí” is located here. To be honest it is pretty crap but it was good enough crac making it. I had some display problems which I intent to fix (I am waiting for a response from the Scratch Forum), but besides that its a pretty simple game. It is set in a clothes shop – i know this may seem weird but it is explained below. The objective of the game is to pick the correct colour of Geansaí, if you do so you will win! As i said before simple!

You can use the arrow keys to move the Cat who changes colour when you put diferent Geansaí’s on him. There is a Geansaí Gorm, a Geansaí Glás and a Geansaí Dearg. Press the Enter/Return button to restart the game. Bring the geansaí to the check out to finish, that is where the display problems are happening… try to ignore them!

The game is called “Siopa Geansaí” after the Geansaí Gorm SEO Competition which basically requires its participants to reach number one on the Google search results for “geansaí gorm” without having those words in the domain name. I couldn’t think of anything else to make a game about so I made it about this!!

Anyway enjoy the game, you can get back to me with feed back if you want but bear in mind that I know its terrible! Oh yeah and

GEANSAÍ GORM GEANSAÍ GORM GEANSAÍ GORM