Friday, October 18, 2013

Ubuntu 13.10 PHPMyAdmin - mcrypt extension is missing

I am setting up a new Drupal installation with LAMP on Ubuntu (Saucy Salamander - 13.10). Installing the LAMP server and PHPMyAdmin was like a breeze. I just needed the following command:
sudo apt-get install lamp-server^ phpmyadmin
Once I logged into the fresh PHPMyAdmin interface, I realized that "mcrypt" module is missing in default Ubuntu installation. The error I found at the bottom of the PHPMyAdmin page simply page said:

"The mcrypt extension is missing. Please check your PHP configuration."

After doing a quick "apt-cache search", I found the right php5-mcrypt module that I was missing. So I issued:
sudo apt-get install php5-mcrypt
sudo service apache2 restart
Interestingly, even after this I had the "mcrypt missing" error. So I took a quick look inside my /etc/php5/ directory and found the "mcrypt.ini" inside /etc/php5/conf.d. Now for apache2 PHP5 module, the configuration files are located inside /etc/php5/apache2/conf.d (not in /etc/php5/conf.d). So I realized that although mcrypt was installed for PHP5, it was not being loaded fro Apache.

So the fix was as shown below. Basically I am just creating a symlink for mcrypt.ini inside PHP5's Apache configuration directory.
cd /etc/php5/apache2/conf.d
sudo ln -s ../../conf.d/mcrypt.ini 30-mcrypt.ini
sudo service apache2 restart
 Hope you find it useful too!

Thursday, May 16, 2013

Disabling LightDM Lock-screen on Ubuntu 13.04

I have a custom LXDE on a Lubuntu installation. After the most recent upgrade to 13.04 (Raring Ringtail), I realized all my custom Compiz shortcuts were all overwritten. I used to use Ctrl+Alt+L as a shortcut to launch xscreensaver to lock my screen, which worked coherently with Synergy that allows me to use my laptop's  keyboard and touch-pad to control other machines in the same network. Not surprisingly after the upgrade Ctrl+Alt+L stopped launching xscreensaver and the same key-combination would fire-up LightDM lock-screen. LightDM's lock-screen is actually quite nice and I would love to keep it if it would work with Synergy, but it doesn't. So I had to disable it. Here's how you do it:
gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.screensaver lock-enabled false
After disabling LightDM, I can launch xscreensaver as shown below to lock my screen:
xscreensaver-command -lock 
Hope it helps someone in my situation.