I used the WPAU (WordPress Automatic Update), found at http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wordpress-automatic-upgrade/ which lets you perform the upgrade from the UI (it’s not an unattended automatic upgrade, but rather Assisted upgrade).
I am posting this using the QuickPress feature in 2.7.
WPAU may not be good for you depending on what weird security features have been enabled by your webhosting provider.
I just completed the upgrade of my blog to WordPress 2.6. It took more time that I had anticipated. However, the process was quite educational.
I have upgraded before using the WordPress Auto Updated plugin. After a few clicks, your blog is updated. It is so easy that it is hard to resist. I tried WPAU in order to get to WordPress 2.6, and the process was somewhat interrupted on the final stages. It was not clear what the problem was. The effect however was any access to any page of the blog would result to a blank page. No errors, no warnings whatsoever.
In terms of troubleshooting, it is really annoying not to have some sort of feedback. My visit to #wordpress at Freenode resulted in “oh dude, join the club”. Apparently, the blank page issue is common and it affects many users. I just noticed that Irene’s blog gives a blank page as well; I wonder if she upgraded recently.
There are a few blog posts that debate on the blank page issue; use blogsearch.google.com to find the most fresh of them. The typical blog post on the blank page issue has a standard format with the author dumping a laundry list of things they tried first before mentioning at the end of the post in vague terms what they think the source of the problem is. I will spare of the long list as we are already at the fourth paragraph of the post.
What I believe was the problem is the theme. When you use WPAU, it does not disable the theme since you are upgrading from within the WordPress administration screen. Then, you end up with a new WordPress and a theme that crashes. If you are planning to try WPAU, it might be good to revert to a default theme first.
If you are reading this, then you probably messed up your blog already. You can change the theme using phpmyadmin, by altering the wp_options table. The option_names of interest are template, stylesheet and current_theme. Put default values here.
Overall it was quite educational to go through the details of installing WordPress, picking new theme, dumping old plugins and updating existing ones. What’s needed now is a full backup and hope the blog works until WordPress 3.0.
Πρόσθεσα τις μεταφράσεις του Γιάννη Κατσαμπίρη στο SVN του GNOME. Έκανα έλεγχο των μεταφράσεων και έστειλα σχόλια στη λίστα του gnome.gr. Ο Γιάννης μετέφρασε ή ενημέρωσε τις μεταφράσεις για τα vinagre, gnome-mag, mousetweaks, mousetweaks-help.
Έκανα σχόλια στο http://laptop.grinia.net/ για τη διαβούλευση για το μαθητικό υπολογιστή. Βλέπω ότι δεν έχουν γίνει πολλά σχόλια από άλλους. Είναι καλό να το κάνετε.
Πρόσθεσα το ιστολόγιο του Αλέξανδρου στον πλανήτη. Ανταλλάξαμε μερικά γράμματα για κάποια τεχνικά ζητήματα (μια εγγραφή είχε ένα χαρακτήρα που δεν είναι utf-8 οπότε όλο το feed φαινόταν με ?????, πως μπορούμε να συνδιάσουμε κατηγορίες του wordperss για τη δημιουργία πιο κατάλληλου feed, χρήση του feedburner). Απομένουν: χρήση των ειδικών βελτιώσεων του feedburner όπως αναγραφή αριθμού σχολίων. Χμμ, ολόκληρες εγγραφές στο feed;
Πριν από μερικές εβδομάδες έγινε δεκτό το patch για την ελληνική διάταξη πληκτρολογίου, για τη χρήση των συμβόλων dead_psili, dead_dasia. Αυτό σημαίνει ότι στις νέες διανομές του Μαρτίου/Απριλίου το πολυτονικό θα δουλεύει, αλλά μπορεί και όχι…
Όταν κάνεις αποπροσάρτηση ενός τόμου/συσκευής USB, το σύστημα δεν θέτει τη συσκευή σε κατάσταση εκτός λειτουργίας ή χαμηλής κατανάλωσης. Αυτά σε Nautilus αλλά πιστεύω και αλλού. Δεν έχουν όλες οι συσκευές τη δυνατότητα αυτή και φαίνεται ότι δεν έχω ούτε μία τέτοια συσκευή (που να υποστηρίζει off-standby). Από την άλλη πλευρά, το VirtualBox κατάφερε να θέσει μια τέτοια συσκευή σε κατάσταση off (πώς το έκανε!;!;) Η προσθήκη υποστήριξης είναι στο TODO για τώρα.
ERT (Hellenic Broadcasting Corporation) is the national radio/television organisation of Greece.
ERT recently made available online part of its audio and video archive, at the website http://www.ert-archives.gr/
When browsing the website from Linux, you were blocked with a message that Linux/Unix operating systems are not supported. This message was appearing due to User-Agent filtering. Even if you altered your User-Agent, the page would not show the multimedia.
Σχετικά με υπολογιστές που χρησιμοποιούν λειτουργικό σύστημα Linux σχετικέςοδηγίες θα υπάρξουν στο άμεσο μέλλον.
which means that they will be providing instructions for Linux systems in the immediate future.
Going through the HTML code of http://www.ert-archives.gr/ one can see that the whole system would work well under Linux, out of the box, if they could change
Firefox, with the mplayerplugin, supports the video/x-ms-wmp streaming format. You can verify if you have it by writing about:plugins in the location bar and pressing Enter. For my system it says
Windows Media Player Plugin
File name:mplayerplug-in-wmp.so
mplayerplug-in 3.40Video Player Plug-in for QuickTime, RealPlayer and Windows Media Player streams using MPlayer
JavaScript Enabled and Using GTK2 Widgets
…
MIME Type
Description
Suffixes
Enabled
video/x-ms-wmp
Windows Media
wmp,*
Yes
I am not sure if the mplayerplugin package is installed by default in Ubuntu, and I do not know what is the workflow from the message that says that a plugin is missing to the process of getting it installed. If you use the Totem Media Player, it instructs you to download and install the missing packages. I would appreciate your input on this one.
A workaround is to write a Greasemonkey script to replace the string so that Firefox works out of the box. However, the proper solution is to have ERT fix the code.
I must say that I would have preferred to have Totem Movie Player used to view those videos.
I just finished watching a documentary from the 80s about ecology and sustainability of the forests on my Linux system. It is amazing to listen again to the voice-over which is sort of a signature voice for such documentaries of the said TV channel. The screenshot shows goats in a forest, and mentioning the devastating effects of said animals on recently-burnt forests.
Planet EL/LAK (πλανήτης) is a blog aggregator of Greek-speaking users that work on free and open-source software. Though the users speak Greek, it is OK to write in English as well.
In the free and open-source communities, the purpose of a planet is to provide a common location where one can read what the people behind the community are doing, thinking, and so on.
We use Google Coop as a means to search the websites and blogs that are shown here. At the top-right of the planet you can see the special search box. If you read something interesting on the planet at some point in time, you can search it through this search box.
Our latest stats for August show that 50% of our visitors use free and open-source software.
Mozilla Firefox has a 80% lead and is the most popular browser. IE is down at 11% and the rest is distributed to many open-source browsers and also accesses from mobile devices.
The vast majority of the visitors (84%) come directly here (either bookmark, or just typing planet.ellak.gr or they just disabled referrers). 8% comes from search engines and the last 8% come from friendly websites (top referrers include www.ellak.gr and BizWriter (Greek). Top keywords are greek, ubuntu and cyprus.
We maintain this planet in an open fashion; see the Planet-ELLAK Google Group, for past discussions, and information on getting your blog/community listed on planet.ellak.gr.
You tried to use the common keyboard shortcuts in the Linux version of Firefox, with a keyboard layout other than us, and you realised they do not work. For example, Ctrl-C does not work when the Greek keyboard layout is active because Firefox receives Ctrl-Ψ (which is undefined).
This is a well-known problem affecting keyboard shortcuts in many languages.
How can someone solve the problem; Should Firefox for Linux be configured so that internally it would consider Ctrl-C and Ctrl-Ψ correspond to the same keyboard shortcut (perhaps in the language pack)? Well, the problem is that one would prefer a solution that is independent of the keyboard layout. You might be running a Greek localisation of Firefox with an active layout for Hindi.
The optimal solution is to have Firefox associate the keyboard shortcuts to physical keys (whatever that means) instead of the characters they are producing. Bug #69230/Mozilla has been there for quite some time although an acceptable solution is available in both GTK+ (GNOME) and OpenOffice.org. For example, in a GNOME application, both Ctrl-C and Ctrl-Ψ are equivalent.
So, what can we do now with the Linux versions of Firefox? Well, it is possible to write a Firefox extension that would intercept keys being pressed in a local layout and convert to the standard keyboard shortcuts Firefox likes.
Such a workaround is available for the Greek language, written by Athanasios Lefteris, at Mozilla και συντομεύσεις πληκτρολογίου σε Linux.
Currently the extension exists in the sandbox of the Mozilla add-ons, meaning that you are required to register (free) and also configure your profile to allow the view of sandboxed extensions (=in early stage of development, about to get accepted). It is desired to to try out the extension and write a short review. This will help to get the extension accepted as official add-on to the masses.
Many thanks to Athanasios!
p.s.
There is an existing Russian version of the extension. It is expected that other languages will follow.
Ακολουθώντας το παράδειγμα του Θάνου, περισσότερα στατιστικά!
Ο Πλανήτης ΕΛ/ΛΑΚ έχει κλείσει 3 εβδομάδες λειτουργίας στο δικτυακό τόπο planet.ellak.gr. Η δημόσια ανακοίνωση του πλανήτη έγινε στην αρχή της δεύτερης εβδομάδας. Ακολουθεί περίληψη των στατιστικών που εμπεριέχουν 2 εβδομάδες δημόσιας λειτουργίας.
Στο διάστημα λειτουργίας είχαμε σχεδόν 1000 μοναδικούς επισκέπτες που κατανάλωσουν 1.3GB.
Η συντριπτική πλειοψηφία των επισκεπτών είναι από την Ελλάδα.
Το Google Feedfetcher (ειδικά για ιστολόγια/ροές RSS) είναι ο πιο τακτικός επισκέπτης μορφής bot. Δεύτερο έρχεται το Bloglines.
Οι μισοί επισκέπτες χρησιμοποιούν Windows ενώ το 43% χρησιμοποιεί Linux. 3.2% με OS/X ενώ υπήρξαν επισκέψεις και με BSD. Κάποιος κατάφερε να συνδέσει το PSP στο Διαδίκτυο.
Ο Firefox καταλαμβάνει το 71% του μεριδίου των περιηγητών ενώ ο IE απομένει με 14%. Υπάρχουν χρήστες που διατηρούν το Mozilla browser, 4.2%. Κάποιος συνδέθηκε με το κινητό του (Nokia) [εγώ] ενώ άλλος χρησιμοποιεί το Firebird, εκείνη την πολύ παλιά έκδοση του Firefox.
Από τους αναγνώστες RSS, ξεχωρίζει ο liferea.
Από τους referer, ο καλύτερος ήταν το www.ellak.gr με δεύτερο το planet.hellug.gr.
(oh, I am writing this through a lousy Net connection; thanks Engelados)
I tried out the latest OLPC image, specifically build 218, on Qemu and my aim was to get Greek support configured, if it was not there already.
The OLPC does not currently come with a good set of Greek fonts; you will need to install a set of fonts such as DejaVu or GFS Didot.
Installing means adding the font files in the directory /usr/share/fonts/. The current font configuration files in the OLPC favour Bitstream Vera, therefore you would need to move the bitstream subdirectory outside the fonts directory. DejaVu is based on Bitstream Vera and therefore you will not notice any change once you upgrade. Also, Fedora Core 6 and Ubuntu Linux are based on DejaVu. You need DejaVu, as Bitstream Vera does not currently support Greek. Both DejaVu and GFS Didot are free and open-source fonts.
Note: This screenshot shows DejaVu Sans, not GFS Didot. Sorry for the typo.
This is the OLPC running the cut-down version of the Abiword wordprocessor. Click on the image to view the full size.
This is the OLPC showing the same document above with GFS Didot. The font looks quite nice and similar to old greek textbooks. There is a small issue however, it does not have the character coverage of DejaVu. For example, notice that the Euro sign is missing from GFS Didot. Also, other glyphs such as fancy bullet characters are missing as well. Normally, the OLPC software should replace those missing characters with the correct characters from another font. Apparently something is wrong here and needs further investigation.
Writing support for the Greek language has to be configured separately in the OLPC. The case with other languages appears to be that the default layout is that of the language; apparently there is no need to switch between Brazilian Portuguese and English. For the Greek language it appears that it is good to be able to switch between Greek and English.
There are several places that you can add Greek writing support. The most common is in /etc/X11/xorg.conf. Having gone through the configuration files, I think that /etc/X11/Xkbmap is also a good place and saves us from touching the core Xorg configuration file.
To write the full set of Greek letters, one needs to set the extended variant for the Greek layout, and also try to set the Compose key (for ano teleia). These things should be simplified…
I am not sure how the OLPC looks like (the only photos I saw where not focusing on the keyboard). Perhaps it would be useful to have a test machine at my disposal (hint, hint). Jim Gettys wrote at his blog about the different languages that the first generation of the OLPC should support. Both Kinyarwanda and Kiswahili use the latin alphabet, therefore there are no significant issues with font support or writing support.
p.s.
Greece will carry out a pilot with OLPC laptops next September.
