This is the second part of the PHP and Friendica Debugging Post Series . It is assuming that you have a ready to go Ubuntu 22.04 Linux computer or virtual machine ready for configuration, with sudo privileges for your user account. You can follow this post on how to get one configured in Parallels Desktop on macOS. At the end of this tutorial you will be able to do step-level debugging of a locally hosted PHP site on your computer using the PHPStorm IDE.

Friendica relies heavily on worker processes for doing things like federation, cleaning up the database, and many other tasks. It can either be run as a periodically running system cron job or in a daemon mode. A lot of this is personal preference of the administrator. I prefer to run it as a daemon process, mostly because posts are federated instantly rather than waiting for the cron job to be kicked off again several minutes later. The best way to use the daemon process is to have it be managed by systemd so that Linux will make sure it starts on startup, create a new one if it crashes, etc. On the Friendica links page I found this post by TauSys on setting up the daemon as a systemd process . None of the steps are hard per se, but it lays them out very clearly. It is unfortunately in German and some of the translation messes up some of the example configuration files etc. For that reason I’ve decided to write this post on how to setup the daemon as a systemd process, inspired heavily by the above post.

The main Friendica documentation has install instructions for setting up the core part of the system. However it assumes that you have properly installed all the dependencies and leaves securing the system as an exercise to the user. While I have found a couple of tutorials around the internet like this one or this one to fill in the gaps before that I have found them a little lacking and dated as well. I was able to make my way through it but I’m not sure if all will. I therefore decided to write this soup to nuts tutorial on standing up a Friendica instance with Ubuntu 22.04. Please use the table of contents to skip parts that you don’t need, like setting up your cloud instance.

Earlier today in my NsCDE post I said maybe I’d install CDE and do a comparison between the two. Well then I decided to just bite the bullet and do it. So here is that direct comparison. Please reference that post for install instructions for NsCDE.

Note: When installing NsCDE under Ubuntu or other modern GNOME systems there is some wonkiness with the default GNOME file manager and text editor that we get into below. It may be better to install different applications for those and set the defaults to that at configuration time.

Back in college the Common Desktop Environment (CDE) was the cat’s meow of Unix workstations. I’d be running that on the many thousands of dollars Solaris or HP-UX workstations in my university’s computer labs. If it wasn’t that then it’d be IRIX on the SGI workstations. At home when I finally got Unix running the only thing that was available to me were things like FVWM, Afterstep, or Enlightenment. They were poor approximations but still better than Windows95. In recent years you’ve been able to actually install CDE on Linux thanks to the continuation of the project on SourceForge . However it is a bit long in the tooth architecturally and there are some problems with configuration etc. Thanks to this OSNews story I discovered there is a project meant to theme modern FVWM to act/look like CDE called Not so Common Desktop Environmynt (NsCDE) . So I decided to give it a whirl in a VM.

UPDATE: I ended up doing the “eventually I’ll do a CDE comparison” today in this post . In there you will find some good alternatives for the wonky behaviors you get with the standard GNOME text editor and file manager (hint there are some pretty good alternatives you just have to install them and use as default when you configure the system).

I traditionally live most of my life in virtual machines, both in the cloud and on my desktop. It allows for proper sandboxing of development environments, customer projects, apps, etc. Whenever I can I try to stay within just using them. In the past I’ve relied on VirtualBox for that, since it was available on Linux, Mac, and Windows host OS’s. When I switched to Apple Silicon the only viable option that “just worked” out of the box was Parallels Desktop . It comes out of the box with wizards for several Linux versions and Windows. For my new PHP development with real debugging however I needed Ubuntu 22. The version in Parallel’s wizard is Ubuntu 20. While Ubuntu does have AMD64 versions of Ubuntu Server for download, they only have Intel versions of Ubuntu Desktop. These are the steps to taking the Ubuntu Server install disk and making a fully operational desktop environment. This is the first part of my Debugging PHP and Friendica Series .

I first joined the fediverse back in March of 2018 after being fed up (yet again) with some Facebook shenanigans and concern over hyper-consolidation, as this post detailed . It started with an account on the Diaspora network , which feels very Facebook like. It was soon followed by one on Mastodon , which is more Twitter like. It wasn’t long after settling in that I started doing development on the Diaspora platform. My first couple pull requests (1st Diaspora PR , 2nd Diaspora PR ) were accepted just about four years ago. That then blossomed into doing some major work on the API which is in the 0.8 version of the Diaspora software. As I documented here though , by early 2019 I was kind of done with having a bifurcated fediverse existence. Friendica bridges many federating protocols so gave me what I wanted. I had considered contributing to Friendica instead, as I wrote in the previous link, and again here earlier this year , but it wasn’t until last week that I finally made that contribution.

On the fediverse (gratuitous personal profile link) I follow lots of international people. As a consequency I see lots of posts in other languages. I always hated dumping it into Google Translate to get an English representation. Fortunately in June Mozilla announced the result of their partnership with Project Bergamot to create a Firefox browser extension . The project is creating open source trained datasets for translation between many European languages. Because the model is pre-trained all of the translation is done on the local machine, thus with no network interactions whatsoever!