[HOWTO] Installing Emacs 26.3 on Ubuntu or XUbuntu 19.04

Timo Geusch from The Lone C++ Coder's Blog

My previous instructions for installing a newer Emacs version on Ubuntu still work. Ubuntu (and in my case, XUbuntu) 19.04 ships with Emacs 26.1 out of the box. As usual I want to run the latest version – Emacs 26.3 – as I run that on my other Linux, FreeBSD and macOS machines. I only […]

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Installing Flarum on Ubuntu 18.04

Andy Balaam from Andy Balaam's Blog

I am setting up a forum for sharing levels for my game Rabbit Escape, and I have decided to try and use Flarum, because it looks really usable and responsive, has features we need like liking posts and following authors, and I think it will be reasonably OK to write the custom features we want.

So, I want a dev environment on my local Ubuntu 18.04 machine, and the first step to that is a standard install.

Warning: at the time of writing the Flarum docs say it does not work with PHP 7.2, which is what is included with Ubuntu 18.04, so this may not work. (So far it looks OK for me.)

Here’s how I got it working (as far as the web installer stage, anyway):

sudo apt install \
    apache2 \
    libapache2-mod-php \
    mariadb-server \
    php-mysql \
    php-json \
    php-gd \
    php-tokenizer \
    php-mbstring \
    php-curl

php -r "copy('https://getcomposer.org/installer', 'composer-setup.php');"

# Get the neat line from https://getcomposer.org/download/
# Don't copy it exactly!
php -r "if (hash_file('SHA384', 'composer-setup.php') === '544e09ee996cdf60ece3804abc52599c22b1f40f4323403c44d44fdfdd586475ca9813a858088ffbc1f233e9b180f061') { echo 'Installer verified'; } else { echo 'Installer corrupt'; unlink('composer-setup.php'); } echo PHP_EOL;"

mkdir ~/bin
php composer-setup.php --install-dir=~/bin/ --filename=composer
rm composer-setup.php

cd /var/www/html
sudo mkdir flarum
sudo chown $(whoami) flarum

# Log out and in again here to get composer to be in your PATH
cd flarum
composer create-project flarum/flarum . --stability=beta

sudo chgrp -R www-data .
sudo chmod -R 775 .

sudo systemctl restart apache2

Go to http://localhost/flarum in your browser, and follow the instructions there to get set up.

If I get further, I will update this post, including on how to set up the MySQL database.

If you want to find and share levels for Rabbit Escape, check up on our progress setting up the forum at https://artificialworlds.net/rabbit-escape/levels.

Building Emacs 25.2 on XUbuntu 17.04

Timo Geusch from The Lone C++ Coder's Blog

I haven’t done much with Ubuntu recently, but had to set up a laptop with XUbuntu 17.04. That came with Emacs 24.5 as the default emacs package, and as skeeto pointed out in the comments, with a separate emacs25 package for Emacs 25.1. I tend to run the latest release Emacs everywhere out of habit, […]

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Restoring user groups once no longer in sudoers

Tim Pizey from Tim Pizey

Ubuntu thinks it is neat not to have a password on root. Hmm.

It is easy to remove yourself from all groups in linux, I did it like this:

$ useradd -G docker timp

I thought that might add timp to the group docker, which indeed it does, but it also removes you from adm,cdrom,lpadmin,sudo,dip,plugdev,video,audio which you were previously in.

As you are no longer in sudoers you cannot add yourself back.

Getting a root shell using RefiT

What we now need to get to is a root shell. Googling did not help.

I have Ubuntu 14.04 LTS installed as a dual boot on my MacBookPro (2011). I installed it using rEFIt.

My normal boot is power up, select RefiT, select most recent Ubuntu, press Enter.

To change the grub boot command instead of Enter press F2 (or +). You now have three options, one of which is single user: this hangs for me. Move to the 'Standard Boot' and again press F2 rather than Enter. This enables you to edit the kernel string. I tried adding Single, single, s, init=/bin/bash, init=/bin/sh, 5, 3 and finally 1.

By adding 1 to the grub kernel line you are telling the machine to boot up only to run level one.

This will boot to a root prompt! Now to add yourself back to your groups:

$ usermod -G docker,adm,cdrom,lpadmin,sudo,dip,plugdev,video,audio timp

Whilst we are here:

$ passwd root

Hope this helps, I hope I don't need it again!

Never use useradd always use adduser