Uly.me

cloud engineer

Dual Booting Ubuntu and Mint

I’ve been using the Mac OS for six years now. Prior to that, I was an Ubuntu user for 10 years. I do miss working with Linux. Part of the reason I switched, I was tired of constantly fixing the Ubuntu desktop. Every time there was a new release, something was broken and I needed to fix it. Then Ubuntu Unity desktop came along. That essentially was the last straw. I dabbled with Mint a little bit, but it only lasted for a couple of months.

These past few months, I’ve been trying to rekindle my love for Linux. I’m trying out two distros. I’m running Ubuntu 16.04 LTS and Linux Mint 18, dual booting each distro sharing a 1TB hard drive. Each distro is taking up 500GB. Both are running the Cinnamon desktop. There are a few issues here and there. It’s not quite the polish product yet. On both instances, I had to install the Chromium browser because Firefox, the default browser, is not just up to snuff.

Overall, Ubuntu and Linux Mint have improved tremendously since I last used them. The Sound and WiFi network settings are much, much more easier to configure than the previous iterations. If you were ask me which distro do I prefer now, I can’t give you an answer at the moment. Time will tell. It’s going to take a while to get used to navigating and using the Cinnamon desktop effectively. Maybe a follow up post is in order.

The Return of the Linux Desktop

I’m thinking about using the Linux desktop again after 4 years of inactivity. The MacOS was the desktop of choice. I’ve been happy with the switch. I don’t anticipate abandoning it any time soon. Lately I thought about sharpening up my Linux skills after having been dormant for years. I need a Linux platform that I can work with. Ubuntu is my default, but there are other distros equally interesting. Mint, Debian and Fedora come to mind. Instead of having multiple boot partitions, I might install Ubuntu as the base distro and install Virtualbox. Other distros can be fired up as virtual machines. In that way, it’s simple to manage. I just need a heftier machine that can handle several VMs running at the same time. That’s the plan for the next several weeks.

Can’t Connect To MySQL Server

I recently had a problem with an Ubuntu server that was running MySQL. None of my applications were connecting to the database. After poking around in the server, I realized the database doesn’t seem to be running at all. I tried restarting it from the Terminal, but I ran into this error message.

ERROR 2003 (HY000): Can't connect to MySQL server on '10.10.10.110' (111)

As it turns out, the Ubuntu server picked up a new IP address of 10.10.10.113 from the last reboot. I went ahead and assigned a static IP address to the server of 10.10.10.200. I should have done it initially when I setup the server. If you need help setting up a static IP address on the Ubuntu server, here are the instructions on how to set Ubuntu server to static IP address.

I looked at the MySQL configuration file called /etc/mysql/my.cnf, the bind-address was manually set to the old IP address of 10.10.10.110. So, edited the file and entered the new IP address of 10.10.10.200.

bind-address = 10.10.10.200

Finally, I restarted the network as well as started the MySQL server.

sudo /etc/init.d/networking restart
sudo /etc/init.d/mysql start

Everything is hunky dory again.

Fix Apache FDQ Error

If you’re working on Ubuntu and running Apache, you probably have seen this error when rebooting Apache. It says “could not reliably determine the server’s fully qualified domain name.” There’s a simple fix to this configuration issue.

You’ll need to edit the /etc/apache2/httpd.conf config file:

sudo nano /etc/apache2/httpd.conf

and add this entry:

ServerName localhost

Reboot Apache

sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart

The error is now gone.