Installation guide for Chamilo 1.11.16 on Digital Ocean with PHP7.4

This guide will take you through the process of installing the Chamilo e-learning portal, version 1.11.16 on a fresh Digital Ocean instance, on an Ubuntu 20.04 64bit distribution To follow this guide, you should be familiar with the notion of SSH keys and installing/configuring server software on Ubuntu. Previous articles on this blog explain how to install Chamilo 1.9 using Juju Charms, how to install 1.10.2 on Ubuntu 15.10, 1.10.* on Ubuntu 16.04 and 1.11.* on Ubuntu 17.04.

Installation guide for Chamilo 1.11.4 on Digital Ocean with PHP7

This guide will take you through the process of installing the Chamilo e-learning portal, version 1.11.4 on a fresh Digital Ocean instance,on an Ubuntu 17.04 64bit distribution (also works with minor changes with Ubuntu 18.04) To follow this guide, you should be familiar with the notion of SSH keys and installing/configuring server software on Ubuntu 16.*, 17.* or 18.*. Previous articles on this blog explain how to install Chamilo 1.9 using Juju Charms, how to install 1.10.2 on Ubuntu 15.10, and 1.10.* on Ubuntu 16.04.

Versions of PHP in Ubuntu

If you have to maintain an open source project written in PHP, like we do with Chamilo at BeezNest, you'll have to test your software on multiple versions of PHP to make sure of how well your code is supported on these versions. Of course, being open source, you can publish it on Github and then benefit from Travis-CI to get tests run automatically, but some stuff might be tricky to do, and maybe you'd like to test one specific thing, quickly, under a specific PHP version. Well, it turns out you can probably do that with Docker.

Configure HP LaserJet 100 colorMFP M175nw scanner on Ubuntu

If you have bought an HP LaserJet 100 printer and have it connected on the network, but somehow fail to scan from it, here's how:
  • sudo apt-get install hplip (chances are you already did that, but in the worst case this will do nothing)
  • sudo hp-setup (this launches a new window)
  • search network (if you enabled this in the printer web config page, you can select the "Bonjour" protocol)
  • let it find your printer and select "download and install driver"
  • accept to "add printer"

Using Chamilo juju charm to setup a dev environment on Digital Ocean

If you're in a hurry/on speed, know this:
  • this procedure is slightly more difficult (so longer) than installing the charm on Amazon
  • you can skip directly to "Installing Juju"
  • if you already have juju installed, you can skip to the last 2 lines of the "Installing juju" section
  • if you already have juju-docean installed and configured, you can skip directly to "Provisioning VMs"
  • otherwise, just continue reading, it's worth a few minutes...
This tutorial regroups a lot of advanced notions, so if you want to know more about one of the follo

Firefox 15 PDF Reader preview

In Ubuntu, the shipped Firefox 15 comes with the new embedded HTML5 PDF reader disabled. It is easy to enable though. Go to "about:config", search on "pdf" and switch the "pdfjs.disabled" entry to "false". Restart Firefox and test it pointing to some PDF URL. In case it does not work, have a look at the "Portable Document Format (PDF)" type to action association in "Edit->Preferences->Applications" and set it to the internal Firefox preview.

Creating a software RAID array on an already installed Ubuntu 11.04

Let's say you got confused by a misleading fake-RAID feature on an HP Blade server and you decided to ignore that the Ubuntu installer was telling you it found 2 disks while it was supposed (if it was actual hardware RAID) to be detecting only one. And let's say you are lucky to have 3 disks, and you only one to use two as the RAID array (and they do not contain your operating system, i.e. the / partition). You might wonder: "And now what? S**** you, HP!" (that last bit is if you left panic get you, of course).