Query7 - PHP jQuery Linux

I was getting some problems with the latest Ubuntu release (ext3 didn’t agree with ubuntu) so i decided to try another distro. Ive always been an apt-get man so i wanted to try something different. I downoloaded the Fedora 9 DVD and popped it in the drive.

I couldn’t use the GUI installer as there was some conflict with my monitor, so i need to use the text based installer. Its no big hassle for me, ive used the text base installer on slackware and other distros. The anaconda installer is great, i selected the programs i wanted to install and install. All up the install only took around 20-25 minutes - very speedy considering i installed gnome, xfce, servers, dev tools and a number of other things. Once the installation had finished i rebooted.

Straight away i noticed that i didn’t have an X server. When you run Fedora for the first time, im pretty sure theres a little dialog that lets you make accounts etc.. unfortunately there was no text option for me and i got left with a command prompt. I was forced to login as root. I tried startx and it worked! I was in the GNOME desktop, i quickly made myself a normal user account and restarted the computer. Unfortunately the Desktop Manager/GUI Login screen didn’t start so i was at the command prompt again, however i could still startx .

UPDATE: I decided to reinstall Fedora (2 Hours after i initially installed it. I got Anaconda to run graphically, i added the boot parameter resolution=1024×768 and it worked! The installation went smoothly, the boot screen was working and i added my user the proper way. X works straight off now, im very pleased

The jQuery team are approaching the UI 1.5 release, the library of demos is steadily building up and i personally cannot wait until its fully released . One of the “weaker” points of other Javascript User Interfaces and previous releases were the themes for the window borders etc. This has been solved in jQuery UI 1.5 with the theme roller. Its a well polished theme roller with features like the jQuery colour picker in it, you set the necessary classes and you can see a live demo of what it will look like on dialogs, sliders and tabs below, very nice.

Heres a video by the Filament group, who made the theme roller.

ThemeRoller for jQuery UI Screencast v4 from filamentgroup on Vimeo.

The RSS feed has been fixed and the theme is just about done! Its a very simple theme (as CSS/graphics have never been my strong point) but it will look good. More jQuery, PHP and Linux content coming soon!

Im in the process of making/designing a custom wordpress theme for the site. Alot of things went wrong in the upgrade from 2.5 to 2.5.1 so once the new theme is finished, im doing a fresh install of wordpress so it (hopefully) irons out the RSS and posting bugs. Im backing up the database (and ill restore it) so all of the posts will still be where they were.

More posts are coming, ive been working on a couple of video tutorials lately so i can post them with the launch of the new site/theme.

Just letting everyone know.

~Panzer

Heres Part 2 of the jQuery AJAX login tutorial. If you haven’t already, i suggest you read part 1 located here.

We are going to start writing the PHP code to process the form. This is fairly basic stuff, using $_POST to get the values from the form, then checking them against pre-assigned values, if they match, then echo approved, if they don’t then echo denied.

So at the end of this stage, you will have an HTML form set up and this PHP file. You can enter the username Panzer and the password of query7 into the form and it will return Logged in.

Next tutorial, the fun part, the AJAX!