1. Ubuntu Server Setup

The following screen shots are taken while installing Ubuntu Server 8.04 (note the latest Ubuntu Server Edition is 8.04.2)

While the default choice is Yes (Detect keyboard layout), I have found that that for the keyboards used here in the US, skipping the auto-detection step is actually easier.

This is the host name you want to use. For whatever reason, the default Ubuntu Server setting does not set the host-name correctly using DHCP (for instance, you can not use vm-wordpress to locate the server from a Windows machine). This can be addressed easily by ensuring that the following lines are present in /etc/dhcp3/dhclient.conf:

send host-name "<hostname>";
request subnet-mask, broadcast-address, time-offset, routers, domain-name, domain-name-servers, host-name, ntp-servers;

For a dedicated server, the default partitioning scheme (use entire disk) should be suffice.

If you are setting it up on your home computer, this is usually blank.

For the WordPress server setup LAMP and OpenSSH are the only required components. However, I usually add the Print Server (CUPS) so that the whole home network can share the printer on the WordPress server (since it is always on) and Samba File Server so that I can copy files from a Windows machine.

Don’t confuse MySQL root user password with the Ubuntu login password. They can be the same but it is recommended that you use a different strong password for each.

We are almost done!

If everything goes well, you should be greeted with this login screen after your machine is re-booted.

As a best practice, you should always ensure that your distribution is up-to-date by getting the latest patches/software:

This can be achieved by issuing the following commands upon log in:

A reboot maybe necessary if kernel image is updated.

2. Create Samba Share

We have already installed Samba during the Ubuntu Server install. To use it we need to first configure it properly.

sudo vi /etc/samba/smb.conf

at the end add the following section:

Now we can add a user for Samba share:

3. Install WordPress

In your user directory (e.g. /home/{user name}):

4. Configure Database

mysql> create database wordpress;
mysql> grant all privileges on wordpress.* to "wpuser"@"localhost" identified by "password";
mysql> flush privileges;
mysql> exit

In my previous tutorial, I used phpMyAdmin as the SQL tool. While it is much easier to use then the mysql command line, it nevertheless adds some risk if you allow database logins remotely. So I would not recommand installing it on the production server.

5. Configure WordPress

Edit the content of wp-config.php:

Since our WordPress installation is located in the blog directory, the default url will be http://yourdomain/blog/. If you want your blog to be accessible from the root (e.g. http://yourdomain/) you will need to modify /var/www/blog/index.php.

First copy it to www root:

And change the require() line to point to the new path: require(‘blog/wp-blog-header.php’).

a. for new setup

Run the setup script at http://yourdomain/blog/wp-admin/install.php

After running the installation script, we want to make sure that our blog is pointed at the correct location. go to http://yourdomain/blog/wp-adming/, select options. In General Options section, you will see one line like "WordPress address (URL)" and another line like "Blog address (URL)". This is the place where you specify how your blog main url looks to the outside world. If you want your blog to appear as http://yourdomain/ then make sure WordPress address is pointed to http://yourdomain/blog and Blog address is pointed to http://yourdomain. If you want your blog to appear as http://yourdomain/blog/ then make sure both entries are the same (http://yourdomain/blog/).

Now the installation of WordPress is complete.

If you need URL rewrite capability, you will need to load the URL rewrite module:

b. for existing setup (restoring a previously backed-up database)

For a detailed discussing on how to perform backup/restore on MySQL database, please refer to this article.

If you need to access the MySQL database from another machine that is on the LAN, you will want to change /etc/mysql/my.cnf and modify the bind-address to the server address, you can read more here.

I omitted some content which are less commonly used in this article. You can refer to my previous tutorial for more information.

Since my MIDI keyboard uses the game port interface on my Sound Blaster Live! sound card, there is no need to load any firmware. After the sound card is recognized by the system, you will find a /dev/midi device (for some reason, my midi device would change between /dev/midi and /dev/midi1 once a while, but this only happens when I access the midi device using jack). Without any additional software, you should be able to do a cat /dev/midi and see some "random" characters printed on the console whenever you press a key on the MIDI keyboard. Even without touching the MIDI keyboard, you should still see characters get printed in the console at a rate of 3 to 5 characters per second. Alternatively, you could use amidi –dump and when a key is pressed some hex values should be displayed.

After confirmed that the MIDI device is working properly, we can move on to setting up the software environment. Most of the aforementioned articles are concentrated on connecting to MIDI devices using ALSA. What I have found out though is that using OSS is much easier.

Various sources have suggested that connecting MIDI devices using ALSA have very low-latency (e.g. the time between when a key is pressed and the note is played) and thus is the preferred method. But for modern computers, this kind of latencies have rarely been a problem. There might be some difference in terms of latency between using ALSA and using OSS but they are not observable in my case.

To use OSS, all you need to do is to choose the correct option in qsynth:

qsynth settings 1

qsynth settings 2

If you have multiple sound cards configured like in my case, you can select from which sound card you want the sound to be outputted (e.g. /dev/audio or /dev/audio1 etc.). The sound does not have to be produced on the same card where the MIDI device is connected. In fact, using a single sound card as the output device might be the most attractive solution since otherwise you will need to have one pair of speakers connects to each of the soundcard output. In my case, the Sound Blaster Live! card is only used for it’s game port to connect with my MIDI keyboard.

After you have successfully restarted qsynth, you should be able to hear sound when you press on the MIDI keyboard and you should see the indicator on qsynth flashing, indicating that MIDI signal was received.

qsynth

If you see activities from qsynth but there is no sound coming out then chances are that you have chosen the wrong sound card as the output device. Note that you will have to first load a Sound Font into qsynth, otherwise you will not hear any sound either. A few popular Sound Fonts can be downloaded from here.

MIDI Setup with ALSA requires a bit more work. First you need to start the jack daemon (jack -d alsa), or you could use the GUI Jack Control. Then you can start rosegarden. If you have timidity installed you you should be able to use timidity’s port (usually 128:0) as midi device port. If you are not sure, you could use pmidi -l to find out (this shows what my configuration looks like):

 Port     Client name                       Port name
 14:0     Midi Through                      Midi Through Port-0
 20:0     SBLive! Value [CT4780]            EMU10K1 MPU-401 (UART)
 21:0     Emu10k1 WaveTable                 Emu10k1 Port 0
 21:1     Emu10k1 WaveTable                 Emu10k1 Port 1
 21:2     Emu10k1 WaveTable                 Emu10k1 Port 2
 21:3     Emu10k1 WaveTable                 Emu10k1 Port 3
128:0     TiMidity                          TiMidity port 0
128:1     TiMidity                          TiMidity port 1
128:2     TiMidity                          TiMidity port 2
128:3     TiMidity                          TiMidity port 3

You can use either the Emu10k1 ports (21:x) or TiMidity ports (128:x) as output.

Since Sound Blaster Live! utlizates hardware based SoundFont, you must load appropriate SoundFont onto the board before you can hear any playback. Due to the on-board memory limitations, not all SoundFonts can be loaded onto Sound Blaster Live! Here is an 8MB version of the Creative Sound Font that you can use with Sound Blaster Live!. To load the sound font use the following command:

sfxload 8MBGMSFX.SF2 (assuming that the Sound Font is located in the current directory)

For more detailed MIDI setup using ALSA you can refer to the two articles I mentioned. What I have found is that the MIDI environment using jack is not always stable. For instance, I could instantiate the ALSA sound driver using jackd but not directly with jack GUI. And once a while jack would lock up. Another problem is that the MIDI device name seemed to change back and forth between /dev/midi and /dev/midi1 whenever I was using jack. This might be because the fact that I am using two sound cards though. Anyway, since the performance of using OSS turned out to be quite good I did not investigate the ALSA issue much further…

Ubuntu 8.04 recognized the second sound card with no problem. A cat /dev/sndstat confirmed that both sound cards are indeed installed:

Card config:
HDA Intel at 0xf9ff8000 irq 22
SBLive! Value [CT4780] (rev.7, serial:0×80221102) at 0xe880, irq 18

And lsmod | grep snd showed that midi modules were successfully loaded:

snd_rtctimer, snd_emux_synth, snd_seq_virmidi, snd_emu10k1, snd_ac97_codec, snd_seq_dummy, snd_seq_oss, snd_hda_intel, snd_pcm_oss, snd_mixer_oss, snd_pcm, snd_rawmidi, snd_hwdep, snd_seq, snd_timer, snd_seq_device

So the dual sound card setup is pretty effortless. Getting the MIDI keyboard setup correctly though turned out to be quite tricky and I will share my experience in a later post.