I recently updated to the newest version, 9.10 AKA Karmic Koala and I love it. It’s fast and everything works perfectly. Or nearly everything…

The one thing that really annoyed me in this version was the MySQL terminal. All of a sudden after the upgrade ctrl+r for reverse search didn’t work anymore. And there was more…delete didn’t work either and esc+backspace was behaving weirdly too. Unfortunately I did not have time to look for a solution because of my work load. But then xmas came and here I am, stuck at home with the family, giving me a lot of time to research about those things that were very low on my priorities list. And I found a solution!

It seems that Ubuntu replaced libreadline with libedit. And readline is the library that provides all those cool command line capabilities. So let’s enable it again, but instead of compiling the whole thing again, let’s just use a wrapper, the readline wrapper!

First, let’s install it:

sudo apt-get install rlwrap

That’s it! Now all we need to do is to start mysql command line interface through rlwrap:

rlwrap -a mysql -uUSER -pPASSWORD DBNAME

To make things easier, let’s create an alias in our bashrc file.

vi ~/.bashrc

And add the alias:

alias mysql='rlwrap -a mysql'

Credit: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1147183

Make svnserve load on startup:

First create a new script on init.d

vi /etc/init.d/svnserve

The script’s contents:

#!/bin/bash
### BEGIN INIT INFO
# Provides:          svnserve
# 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: Start subversion server
### END INIT INFO
 
svnserve --listen-host=myhost.com -d -r /path/to/svn/repos

Then make the script is executable

chmod +x /etc/init.d/svnserve

Use update-rc.d to add script to init

update-rc.d svnserve defaults

That’s it!

In order to keep my servers always showing the correct date/time I use a little software called chrony and make sure I’m using the correct time zone.

All the actions below need superuser privileges

To install it simply use apt-get:

$ apt-get install chrony

Once you’ve installed chrony you need to select your current time zone:

$ tzselect

To make sure it is selected on every boot I just export the TZ environment variable in my /etc/rc.local

$ vi /etc/rc.local

And add the following lines:
# Export timezone
TZ=’Europe/Brussels’; export TZ

I found doing the above was not enough, so I also edited my /etc/timezone file and added the correct time zone there:

$ echo "Europe/Brussels" > /etc/timezone

And still it wasn’t enough, so I reconfigured the package tzdata

$ dpkg-reconfigure tzdata

And finally that did it! To make sure it would still be correct on a future reboot I rebooted my machine:

$ reboot