Drupal installation : A Slackware Story

I was trying to install drupal on my machine, being jobless for one month and things left to be done it was necessary for me to do some freelance jobs and the only one left for me was the one related to drupal. Buts it was out of the question to use windows for the sake of easiness. Anyway I decided to configure Drupal on my Slackware machine.

As everyone out there I also referred drupal site for installation steps, and it was like the following

Step 1: Download and uncompress Drupal
Step 2: Create the database
Step 3: The settings.php file
Step 4: Run the installation script

So I got the latest drupal-7.14.tar.gz file from the Drupal site. And uncompressed it to the /var/www/ directory.

$ wget http://ftp.drupal.org/files/projects/drupal-7.14.tar.gz
  $ tar -xzvf drupal-7.14.tar.gz

then I moved the uncompressed drupal directory to the directory /var/www/

# mv drupal-7.14/ /var/www/
  # mv /var/www/drupal-7.14/ /var/www/test/

And thus I completed my first step and the second step was the creation of a database. The steps are given below.

bash-4.1# mysql -u root -p; 
 Enter password: 
 Welcome to the MySQL monitor.  Commands end with ; or \g. 
 Your MySQL connection id is 2 
 Server version: 5.1.56 Source distribution 

 Copyright (c) 2000, 2010, Oracle and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. 
 This software comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY. This is free software, 
 and you are welcome to modify and redistribute it under the GPL v2 license 

 Type 'help;' or '\h' for help. Type '\c' to clear the current input statement. 

 mysql> CREATE DATABASE drupal; 
 Query OK, 1 row affected (0.03 sec) 

 mysql> CREATE USER 'drupal'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'password'; 
 Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.00 sec) 

 mysql> GRANT SELECT, INSERT, UPDATE, DELETE, CREATE, DROP, INDEX, ALTER ON drupal.* TO 'drupal'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'password'; 
 Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.00 sec) 
  
 mysql> FLUSH PRIVILEGES; 
 Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.00 sec)

Please check if your MySQl is configured correctly, if you are getting any error. For any help you can follow this link “LAMP on Slackware”

So the second step was done.

In the third step I had to create a ‘settings.php’ file from the default.settings.php and assigning the correct permissions.

root@aaron:/var/www/htdocs/test# mv  sites/default/default.settings.php sites/default/settings.php
 root@aaron:/var/www/htdocs/test# chmod 777 sites/default/settings.php

In the fourth step I pointed the browser to http://localhost/test/ but what I got was a 404 message.

I couldn’t get the reason at first but then understood that this happened because in slackware the web root is at /var/www/htdocs/ instead of /var/www/. So I copied the ‘test’ directory to the /var/www/htdocs/ and then pointed the browser to http://localhost/test, but instead of showing the installation page it just showed me the directory contents.

So I checked my LAMP configuration and found that php wasn’t enabled in the /etc/httpd/httpd.config file. After configuring it correctly (here is the link for configuring the LAMP in Slackware LAMP on Slackware)and pointing the browser to “http://localhost/test/”, which led me to the installation page.

Then everything went as given in the drupal site, So in short follow the below steps for successful installation of Drupal on localhost.

1. Check the LAMP installation, refer the following link for help “LAMP on Slackware”, (this one is an awesome tutorial for lamp configuration).
2. Read the instructions in the drupal site properly.
3. Get the drupal package from the drupal site.
4. Uncompress it to /var/www/htdocs/ with any name you like to refer.
5. Create a database and a database user with the full permission to the created database.
6. Create a ‘settings.php’ file from ‘default.settings.php’ in the website root directory.
7. Run the installation script by pointing the browser to the drupal directory, for example: http://localhost/test/ if you have uncompressed the drupal compressed package to the /var/www/htdocs/ by the name ‘test’.
8. Do whatever you want to do with your new drupal site !!!

Happy slacking buddies 🙂

Make your firefox faster

To speed up Firefox , you can follow the steps shown below:

1. Open Firefox and in the address bar, type in ‘about:config‘.

2. Click on the button: ‘I’ll be careful, I promise’.

3. Use the search bar located on the page to look for  ‘network.http.pipelining‘ and double click on it to set its value  to ‘True‘.

4. Create a new Boolean value named ‘network.http.pipelining.firstrequest‘ and set that to ‘True‘, as well.

5. Find ‘network.http.pipelining.maxrequests‘ and double click on it. Then change its value to ‘8‘.

6. Look for ‘network.http.proxy.pipelining‘ and set it ‘True‘.

7. Create two new integers named ‘nglayout.initialpaint.delay‘ and ‘content.notify.interval‘; set them to ‘0‘.

8. Now restart your browser to experience the difference, if yours is a fast internet you can feel the difference easily.

There are certain other things that causes the Firefox to work to slow, especially certain addons, so always install only those addons that are really necessary for you.

Sometimes you will see that Firefox is taking some time to load, this may be because the auto-update option is checked. This will make Firefox to check for updates causing the delay.

So make