Using Netbeans with existing SVN or Git repository

Netbeans is known to not work correctly with existing local working copies of remote repositories for both SVN and Git. Especially, if they were checked out using client other than built-in into Netbeans. For example, Netbeans does not allows to enter login and password (fields grayed) and thus can’t operate on these LWCs.

If you’re experiencing such or similar issues, you’re highly recommended to delete local working copy and checkout it again, using Netbeans internal client. If you have some changes stashed, you should think about committing and pushing them using different client and then delete LWC and checkout it again.

Installing and configuring FTP server on on Ubuntu 12.04 and adding users

As for good FTP server for Ubuntu I’ve choosen vsftp server, though it has some glitches (more here), after fairly good response in the Internet. Many guides shows how to configure and use vsftp on local users, though giving them, by default, access only to their home folder. And allowing them to access server via SSH.

Which is not, what we want in most cases.

I’ve found a good guide, which shows you how to add ftp users with access to folder inside WWW root only.

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Fixing 500 OOPS: vsftpd: refusing to run with writable root inside chroot()

Unfortunately, Ubuntu 12.04 LTS has vsftpd (very famous FTP server) in version 2.3.5 as latest one, which is affected by well know problem of disallowing users to login and throwing

500 OOPS: vsftpd: refusing to run with writable root inside chroot()

error, when using default vsftpd configuration (including a must-have chroot_local_user=YES setting).

There are few ways of working around this problem and most of them are discussed in this post.

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Finding Apache installation path and configuration file

There are several ways to determine, where Apache has been installed on your Linux/Unix system and what are other imporant paths for it (WWW root, configuration etc.). You can use this nice blog entry, which in general means executing ps -ef | grep apache to determine path and then running /usr/sbin/apache2 -V with proper path (replace /usr/sbin/ part) to determine Apache configuration details.

You can also use DistrosDefaultLayout page in Httpd Wiki to find default path layout for your particular operating system.

If everything else fails, try to help yourself with Installation and setup of the Apache Web Server (Linux) document.

Copy large folders using command-line with progress indication

By many sources cp is mentioned as the fastest way to copy large filesets. And the only fault of it, is that it does not provide an easy way to see progress of copy process. This post discusses various ways of fixing this problem. Keep in mind, that this post is (again) QNAP-optimized, meaning that it mostly focuses on solutions available on my old, lame QNAP TS-210 NAS system. It only points out other methods, that are not available on this very limited edition of Linux.

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Chrome keeps crashing, even on Google pages, like Calendar or Gmail

Nowaday browsers has become very large and complex pieces of software, so believe it or not, there could be theoretically thousands of reasons, why your Google Chrome keeps crashing. Here you’ll find some tips and solutions, on what you can try to do, before you start screaming and bloating forums, saying that Chrome sucks and Firefox is the best.

I have filtered all the “good ideas”, that says, you should drop Chrome in favor of this or that browser, that you should go to the mass and pray or that you should buy a gun and shot yourself or your computer. Here you’ll find only serious idea, on what you may try to check or do, to get your Chrome back working.

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Get first character of a string… fast!

Strings can be used as arrays of characters in PHP, which allows to use the [] to get character at particular position. Whenever you know exact position of the character you’re looking for, you should use $str[n], instead of substr($str, n, 1), where n is character position. This is much faster method. More here.