Even though there’s Ubuntu nginx package available (which works perfectly when you’re running PHP apps using FCGI), if you want to take into use Phusion Passenger, you’ll need to recompile Nginx from sources.

Instructions below were verified on Ubuntu 10.04 (Lucid Lynx) Server Edition.

If you already have Nginx ubuntu package installed, uninstall it (NOTE! purge will delete all configuration files – so if you changed them – make a backup for future reference):

sudo aptitude purge nginx

Assuming you already have Rails stack installed, install Passenger gem:

sudo gem install passenger

At the time of this writing the latest version of Passenger is 2.2.11

Let’s check dependencies that Ubuntu nginx package has and install them before compilation:

aptitude show nginx | grep Depends

Depends: libc6 (>= 2.4), libpcre3 (>= 7.7), libssl0.9.8 (>= 0.9.8k-1), zlib1g

sudo apt-get install libc6 libpcre3 libssl0.9.8 zlib1g
sudo /usr/local/bin/passenger-install-nginx-module

sudo /usr/local/bin/passenger-make-enterprisey

sudo vim /etc/init.d/nginx

#! /bin/sh

### BEGIN INIT INFO
# Provides:          nginx
# Required-Start:    $local_fs $remote_fs $network $syslog
# Required-Stop:     $local_fs $remote_fs $network $syslog
# Default-Start:     2 3 4 5
# Default-Stop:      0 1 6
# Short-Description: starts the nginx web server
# Description:       starts nginx using start-stop-daemon
### END INIT INFO

PATH=/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/sbin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/opt/nginx/sbin
DAEMON=/opt/nginx/sbin/nginx
NAME=nginx
DESC=nginx

test -x $DAEMON || exit 0

# Include nginx defaults if available
if [ -f /etc/default/nginx ] ; then
        . /etc/default/nginx
fi

set -e

. /lib/lsb/init-functions

test_nginx_config() {
  if nginx -t $DAEMON_OPTS
  then
    return 0
  else
    return $?
  fi
}

case "$1" in
  start)
        echo -n "Starting $DESC: "
        test_nginx_config
        start-stop-daemon --start --quiet --pidfile /var/run/$NAME.pid \
                --exec $DAEMON -- $DAEMON_OPTS || true
        echo "$NAME."
        ;;
  stop)
        echo -n "Stopping $DESC: "
        start-stop-daemon --stop --quiet --pidfile /var/run/$NAME.pid \
                --exec $DAEMON || true
        echo "$NAME."
        ;;
  restart|force-reload)
        echo -n "Restarting $DESC: "
        start-stop-daemon --stop --quiet --pidfile \
                /var/run/$NAME.pid --exec $DAEMON || true
        sleep 1
        test_nginx_config
        start-stop-daemon --start --quiet --pidfile \
                /var/run/$NAME.pid --exec $DAEMON -- $DAEMON_OPTS || true
        echo "$NAME."
        ;;
  reload)
        echo -n "Reloading $DESC configuration: "
        test_nginx_config
        start-stop-daemon --stop --signal HUP --quiet --pidfile /var/run/$NAME.pid \
            --exec $DAEMON || true
        echo "$NAME."
        ;;
  configtest)
        echo -n "Testing $DESC configuration: "
        if test_nginx_config
        then
          echo "$NAME."
        else
          exit $?
        fi
        ;;
  status)
        status_of_proc -p /var/run/$NAME.pid "$DAEMON" nginx && exit 0 || exit $?
        ;;
  *)
        echo "Usage: $NAME {start|stop|restart|reload|force-reload|status|configtest}" >&2
        exit 1
        ;;
esac

exit 0

sudo chmod +x /etc/init.d/nginx
sudo /usr/sbin/update-rc.d -f nginx defaults

user www-data;
worker_processes  4;

error_log  /opt/nginx/logs/error.log;
pid        /var/run/nginx.pid;

events {
    worker_connections  8192;
    use epoll;
}

http {
    passenger_root /usr/local/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/passenger-2.2.11;
    passenger_ruby /usr/local/bin/ruby;

    include       /opt/nginx/conf/mime.types;

    # set a default type for the rare situation that
    # nothing matches from the mimie-type include
    default_type application/octet-stream;

    # This log format is compatible with any tool like awstats
    # that can parse standard apache logs.
    log_format main '$remote_addr - $remote_user [$time_local] '
                    '"$request" $status $body_bytes_sent "$http_referer" '
                    '"$http_user_agent" "$http_x_forwarded_for"' ;

    access_log  /opt/nginx/logs/access.log;

    sendfile        on;
    tcp_nopush     on;

    keepalive_timeout  0;
    tcp_nodelay        on;

    gzip  on;
    gzip_disable "MSIE [1-6]\.(?!.*SV1)";
    gzip_http_version 1.0;
    gzip_comp_level 2;
    gzip_proxied any;
    gzip_types text/plain text/css application/x-javascript text/xml application/xml application/xml+rss text/javascript;

    include /opt/nginx/conf/sites-enabled/*;
}

sudo mkdir /opt/nginx/conf/sites-available
sudo mkdir /opt/nginx/conf/sites-enabled

sudo vim /opt/nginx/conf/sites-available/mysite.com

server {
        listen   80;
        server_name  www.mysite.com;

        access_log  /home/user/logs/www.mysite.com/access.log;
        root   /home/user/www.mysite.com/public;

        # serve static content directly
        location ~* \.(ico|jpg|gif|png|css|js|swf|html)$ {
          if (-f $request_filename) {
            expires max;
            break;
          }
        }

        passenger_enabled on;

        # deny access to .htaccess files, if Apache's document root
        # concurs with nginx's one
        #
        location ~ /\.ht {
          deny  all;
        }
}

sudo ln -s /opt/nginx/conf/sites-available/mysite.com /opt/nginx/conf/sites-enabled/mysite.com
sudo /etc/init.d/nginx restart

Of course there’s always an option to use github. And if you’re working on an open source project, or want to concentrate on coding and not system administration, github is a lot better option than setting up and managing your own git server (I’ve been so impressed by @defunkt‘s presentation on #frozenrails, that started recommending github to everyone But if you already pay for a virtual machine somewhere (like Linode), then setting up your own git server might be a viable option, especially that it is sooo easy.

The following instructions have been verified on Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx, but should work at least on Ubuntu 9.04 and 9.10 just as well.

Let’s start with installing gitosis itself. Issue the following command on the server:

sudo apt-get install gitosis

This will create a new user ‘gitosis’ and prepare a structure for repositories in /srv/gitosis. Now let’s initialize a gitosis-admin repo – it is used for managing repositories and access rights.

sudo -H -u gitosis gitosis-init < ~/tmp/my_public.key

You need to have a public key for accessing it. If you don’t have one yet, you can use

ssh-keygen -t rsa

command on your local machine to generate public/private key pair. Copy public key to the server before initializing gitosis-admin repository.

Now with gitosis-admin repo initialized on the server – let’s clone it to the local computer.

git clone gitosis@myserver.com:gitosis-admin.git

If you see an error like:

Permission denied (publickey).
fatal: The remote end hung up unexpectedly

That is most likely because you restricted access to you server via ssh to only certain users, and gitosis is not one of them. Edit /etc/ssh/sshd_config, find AllowUsers line and add gitosis to the list.

Now that you have successfully cloned gitosis-admin repo to your local computer, you can add  new users and new repositories.

To add new repository, edit gitosis.conf and add lines like:

[group myrepo]
writable = myrepo
members = user@computer

After that commit and push the changes to gitosis-admin project:

git commit -a -m "Added myrepo repository"

Now you can clone this new repository to your local machine (note .git added to the name of the repository):

git clone gitosis@mygitserver.com:myrepo.git

To allow new user to access your repository, get this user’s public key, copy it to gitosis-admin/keydir as newuser@computer.pub, then edit gitosis.conf and add newuser@computer (without .pub) to the list of members:

[group myrepo]
writable = myrepo
members = user@computer newuser@computer

Now add new files and commit and push changes to git server (make sure you really add all files and don’t forget to push – these are quite common mistakes when adding new users).

git add .
git commit -m "Added user newuser"
git push

With a freshly cloned empty repository you’ll need to add you first files, do a commit and push origin master:

vim README.txt
git commit -a -m "Added readme"
git push origin master

Now you can git pull and git push as much as you like.

Both upgrade and installation on both machines went without a single hickup, which was a positive surprise after my last experience with Ubuntu upgrade.

Bluetooth, wireless, display drivers, sound – everything was working from the first start. The only manual configuration I had to make was because of Intel integrated video blacklisted by Compiz. There are two ways to enable Visual Effects on Intel 965.

1.Skipping check for blacklisted cards

• Create ~/.config/compiz/compiz-manager (for local user) or (/etc/xdg/compiz/compiz-manager)
• Add SKIP_CHECKS=yes
• Go to System->Preferences->Appearence->Visual Effects and select Normal

2. Removing the card from black list

• sudo gedit /usr/bin/compiz
• find a line T=”$T 8086:2982 8086:2992 8086:29a2 8086:2a02 8086:2a12″ # intel 965
• comment it out by placing # in the front
• save the file
• Go to System->Preferences->Appearence->Visual Effects and select Normal

Purely from end-user perspective there are not that many revolutionary changes (you can read the technical details on a number of ubuntu related sites). What I personally liked about 9.04 release is:

• Open Office 3.0
  A number of improvements and new features here. Native tables in Impress, import of DOCX, PPTX, XLSX, Solver component, improved charts. Being an active Open Office user, and having to interact a lot with users of MS Office – these are really great improvements.
• NetBeans 6.5
• New notifications system
  Looks very good – gives you a warm and fuzzy feeling every time you receive a new instant message or connect to network. Mark Shuttleworth blogged about it.
• A really small, but nonetheless important change – Session manager is finally renamed to Startup Applications. At least now I don’t need to think every time I want to add application to autostart list.
• Computer Janitor. A very nice application, helps you to get rid of all unused stuff on your computer, but you have to be careful with it – it offered me to delete skype and xmind amongst all other DEB packages.

Other new things that I read about, but didn’t yet try:

• ext4 filesystem support (thanks to 2.6.28 kernel) – although it reportedly improves booting time, i didn’t yet dare to switch to it, better to wait till potential data loss fixes are verified by long-term use
• New, better Evolution (thanks to Gnome 2.26), that is able to to read Microsoft Outlook Personal Folders or PST files and communicate with existing Microsoft Exchange servers via MAPI – need to try that on my work laptop.

Overall, after going through installation and using it for a couple of days – I am really happy with the new release. Ubuntu continues strong and steady development and becomes a more serious competitor to Windows with every new release.

I’ve been meaning to write about this upgrade for almost two months now. Right after Ubuntu 8.04 was released I upgraded two of my laptops from Ubuntu 7.10 to 8.04. I know, I know, never download software on the release date, wait for a couple of months before all major bugs are fixed and it starts working somehow. But anyway…

On Lenovo T61 everything went mostly fine. After upgrade crash report tool complained about nautilus crash. Then more serious issues started popping up:

• Parallels stopped working. I use this tool quite a lot to debug web pages in different browsers in different operating systems. Apparently there was no support for Ubuntu 8.10 Hardy Heron from Parallels team yet, and the older version that worked in Ubuntu 7.10 didn’t work anymore because of compatibility issues in newer 2.6.24 kernel.A temporary solution (Parallels build 2.2.2226) was provided at a time, and now a new official compatible Parallels release is available for Ubuntu 8.04.

• Samsung SCX-4521F printer refused to work even after proprietory drivers reinstallation. Fortunately solution to this problem was quickly found by one of Ubuntu community members.

On Sony Vaio there were more troubles.

• Since kernel version changed after upgrade to Ubuntu 8.10, I had to download and reinstall proprietory drivers for Nvidia 8400M graphics card. Kernel changed a couple of times after that as a part of standard package update procedure in 8.10, and each time after that I have to reinstall drivers from NVidia site.

• Vaio integrated camera driver is not included in Ubuntu distribution, but Patrick Niklaus built a package for 2.6.24-16-generic kernel.

• Network Manager applet (nm-applett) tries to access keyring all the time to connect to wireless network with WPA

• keyboard layouts switching is not working after autologin (there is a workaround though)

• sleep/hibernate on Vaio still doesn’t work

Now to the good things:

• No more proprietory drivers for Intel wireless card (iwl3945 driver)

• Firefox 3. My first reaction – it is a beauty. (Although after using it for a couple of months, I experienced all beauties of a beta version – random crashes, some sites are not rendered properly, etc.)

• CPU scaling is finally working out of the box and Sony Vaio laptop is not overheating anymore

As I already said, my initial feeling after upgrading to 8.10 was “Ubuntu sucks… get a Mac”. A major upgrade to the next long-term support version was not exactly what I expected. Small, but very annoying bugs in basic functionality undermined success of otherwise very good release. Recently Nokia started supporting Ubuntu for work computers and I immediately changed RedHat on my work laptop to Ubuntu. However I decided to go for Ubuntu 7.10, not 8.04. It works perfectly, even if OpenOffice version is just v2.3 and Firefox – 2.0.

As Tyler put it “[...] get a Mac. Why? Because for the most part, shit works when you plug it in“. I couldn’t agree more. I still stay with Ubuntu, but this last release made me think about moving to Mac again.

Update 2009-05-23: To do justice to Ubuntu – I have not purchased Mac, but upgraded to 9.04 and been generally happy with it.

When Sampo launched the new system this Easter, they took into use Java-based authentication system. Of course it didn’t work in my Ubuntu 7.10, but after removing Open JDK and installing latest Sun JDK it started functioning again – at least log in worked. This Java solution raised a lot of concerns in internet community.

After upgrade to Ubuntu 8.04 that has Firefox 3.0b5 as default browser, Sampo web-bank Java login stopped working again. This time installing latest JRE didn’t help. Hardy Heron (Ubuntu 8.04) contains JRE 1.6.0_06-b02 and it fails on the second security code request during login process. (Remarkably, Sun itself offers only 1.6.0_05 version for Linux). Solutions proposed in Finnish Ubuntu discussion forum (tweaking plugins) didn’t work for me either.

What worked was replacing JRE 1.6 with an older version 1.5:

$sudo apt-get remove sun-java6-bin sun-java6-fonts sun-java6-jre sun-java6-plugin openjdk-6-jre openjdk-6-jre-headless openjdk-6-jre-lib

$sudo apt-get install sun-java5-bin sun-java5-fonts sun-java5-jre sun-java5-plugin

Then I ran

$sudo update-alternatives --config java

command to make sure correct JRE was selected as default.

While struggling with this issue I tried to check Sampo’s technical support pages. There was a nice “Check your computer page” that kindly informed me that my operating system is Linux and “You may be able to run eBanking, but your operating system is not supported by Customer Support.”

This is really frustrating. 14% of the readers of this blog use Linux. On regular sites that I maintain this figure is from 7% to 10%. Sampo caused a lot of grief to its customers, me including, with this software system upgrade. Even after they promised to waive four months’ worth of service charges I’m still not sure it is going to be enough to keep all their customers.

I’ve experienced quite a lot of problems by far – non-\0-terminated strings in UI, transactions with no explanations that I don’t remember authorising, transactions in our web shop that were reported as failed, although money were withdrawn from customer’s accounts, simple web-bank downtimes with HTTP 503 and the latest one is my credit card – Sampo claims that I don’t owe them anything – probably it is one of the Monopoly’s famous “Bank error in your favour, collect $200″ cases.

Beta culture seems to be spreading from internet startups to bank systems (although in this case I would be more inclined to say that this was a huge screw up on Danske Bank IT department’s part). I’m not sure I like it. Gmail beta, Flickr beta, but Sampo Bank beta? It’s definitely fun to participate in debugging of the new web service, but not when it deals with your real money.

This case bring interesting thoughts on how much we trust online services and what is the pain level when we say “that’s enough, I’m leaving”. Is it the same for data banking as for traditional banking. Would you trust your bank to keep your family photo archive or your computer backups? Is it any safer than Flickr/Google Documents? And the other way around – if you trust your data to Google or Yahoo, would you trust them with your money?

Without installing additional hard drive (which would be impractical for laptop user anyway) the only source for extra space was Vista partition. Vista comes preinstalled with most modern laptops, but there’s no need for it to exist taking up to 40Gb of hard drive space, when Ubuntu is the primary OS.

WARNING: Before executing any of the belowmentioned steps, it is highly recommended to make a full backup of your data.

1. Check how much space you will need

It is good to check how much space you will need for your /home partition. Use “Scan Home” in Disk Usage Analyzer (Applications->Accessories->Disk Usage Analyzer) to check how much space do you use now. This tool will give you excellent perspective on how you use your disk space – and where you can possibly save a few gigabytes. Add some gigabytes on top of the current usage figure for future use and now you now what should be the size of your new /home.

2. Create new partition/filesystem

In Ubuntu there's an excellent tool for manipulating partitions - GParted (System->Administration->Partition Editor).

If the estimated size of your home partition is smaller than the size of Vista partition (or any other partition you’re prepared to re-allocate), then the task is really simple – you just convert Vista’s ntfs partition into ext3. In my case all my data in /home folder didn’t fit into 40Gb, so I had to resize the root / partition. This is not possible while the system is running, so I had to burn Ubuntu Live CD, boot from the CD with “try Ubuntu without affecting you current system” option, and run GParted from there.

Note, that resizing and moving partitions is a time-consuming process – it may take hours, depending on the size of your partitions, so reserve enough time for this operation.

3. Mount the new filesystem

$sudo mkdir /mnt/newhome
$sudo mount -t ext3 /dev/??? /mnt/newhome


4. Copy all files to new home

$cd /home
$sudo cp -ax * /mnt/newhome

That is a copy with “preserve links, preserve mode, ownership, timestamps, copy directories recursively, stay on this file system” parameters.

5. Change homes

Unmount new home partition from temporary mount point

$sudo umount /mnt/newhome

Move old home to a temporary folder oldhome (note that this works only when you are moving /home to own partition from root partition, if you had /home on its own partition already and just moving it to the new place, you’ll need to unmount old /home partition instead of moving it to a temporary folder oldhome)

$sudo mv /home /oldhome

Create a mount point for new home partition

$sudo mkdir /home

Mount new home partition to /home

$sudo mount /dev/??? /home

6. Compare the results

You don’t really have to do that, but if you want to be extra sure that everything is ok and are prepared to wait a bit longer, then type:

$sudo diff -rq /home /oldhome

7. Make changes permanent

Add a line to the “/etc/fstab” file that looks like the following:

/dev/??? /home ext3 nodev,nosuid 0 2

8. Remove old home

Now that everything is ok, you can remove the old home folder (same note as in step 5 – if you had old home on its own partition already – then use GParted to reallocate old partition for new needs)

$sudo rm -r /oldhome

Voila! Now your /home is on its very own partition.