KrisWillis.com

I decided to try out some light-weight distros on some old hardware I had lying around, one such distro was ArchLinux, mainly because it would be interesting to try something that is not Debian based. During the installation process, at the “Configure System” stage I received the following error message:

Failed to import current network settings into target system

I thought nothing of it and hit the OK button to proceed. The next stage presented me with a bunch of system files to configure, except that they were all empty – I can’t imagine writing these files from scratch is part of the install process! After a bit of research, it turns out that this happens when the dhcpd package fails to download in the previous stage. All I had to do to fix this was to run the “Install Packages” step again, this time it only downloaded / installed what had previously failed, and my config files were no longer empty.

It turns out, ArchLinux is so light-weight, that all you end up with after installation is the CLI, you have to install Xorg, a window manager, and all of the related bits and pieces yourself – Which is nice, from a customization perspective.

When running PHP5 under Ubuntu, every ~100 times you call session_start() the following error is thrown:

ps_files_cleanup_dir: opendir(/var/lib/php5) failed: Permission denied (13) in ...

By default, session data is stored in /var/lib/php5 which has its permissions set to only allow data to be deleted by it’s owner (and root). It’s like this because there is a cron script that periodically clears the session data. To prevent PHP from also trying to do this, switch off the session garbage collection in php.ini (/etc/php5/apache2/php.ini) with the following:

session.gc_probability = 0

It is quite likely to be set to 1 by default. Save changes and restart apache.

sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart