Drubuntu setup

Starting to work with Ubuntu in developing Drupal sites I needed a little help getting started. I was able to get a great deal of information in setting up a LAMP server for developing multiple Drupal sites from this page.

This page gives even more information on setting up a Drubuntu (Drupal + Ubuntu) development environment. However, I had already been told of Wubi and I'm going to use Komodo Edit instead of Eclipse.

So far my Drupal stack is looking like this:

• Ubuntu through Wubi
• Drupal
• Apache2
• MySQL
• PHP
• PHPMyAdmin
• Komodo Edit
• Mercurial
• Filezilla

So far so good!

Adobe AIR on 64bit Ubuntu

A 64 bit version of Adobe AIR doesn't currently exist for Linux but luckily the 32 bit version will work. Details here.

Upgrading to a newer Drupal minor version

Doing some more Drupal recently I needed a way to quickly update my 6.10 Drupal sites to 6.11. The best way that I have found which seems to be safe was found on this Drupal discussion. The steps go like this:

1. Backup your database.
2. Go user ID 1 and Maintenance mode.
3. Switch to Garland.
4. Disable all custom and contributed modules.
5. Use Grsync (or rsync) to synchronize the versions. (I'm using plain old FTP, Filezilla, because I'm crazy like that.)
6. Run update.php.

Email Testing - Viewing HTML emails

I wanted to write a follow up to my post on email testing. I could now easily capture an email, using DevNull SMTP, but I also wanted to view the email as if I had just received it.

To do this all I needed to do was copy the plain text of the email message to a .eml file and then open the .eml file in a email client. In my case I copied the email from the DevNull SMTP email server applet and into a test.eml file. I then opened up Outlook Express and dragged the test.eml file into the client. Outlook Express was able to render plain text or HTML emails just fine, which is exactly what I was looking for.