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Gnucash with MySQL: Creating custom invoices with PDF output and template based email to the customer

Gnucash with MySQL: Creating custom invoices with PDF output and template based email to the customer

I’ve been using GnuCash for some time and have found it to be a great product. Where GnuCash falls short, in my opinion, is it doesn’t provide for scheduled automatic invoice generation. Additionally creating custom invoices involves learning Scheme which personally I don’t have time to get my head around. So I set out to fix these 2 issues using the tools I know well, namely MySQL, perl, and good old HTML. This post will cover custom invoice generation to html and pdf, and emailing the results to the customer using a template. GnuCash scheduled automatic invoice creation will be covered in another post in the near future. Read more about Gnucash with MySQL: Creating custom invoices with PDF output and template based email to the customer

The simple way to fix Ubuntu duplicate sources.list entry errors

The simple way to fix Ubuntu duplicate sources.list entry errors

For quite some time I’ve been getting duplicate sources.list entry errors when performing software updates/installs on our Ubuntu server. The reason I hadn’t done anything about it was this error is just an annoyance and wasn’t impacting on the servers performance. The problem stems from this server being used for development and testing, so it is always being upgraded to the latest Ubuntu release. This even includes beta releases. The server started out life on Ubuntu 9.04 release and now is sitting on Ubuntu 12.04.  Read more about The simple way to fix Ubuntu duplicate sources.list entry errors

How to fix VirtualBox apt updating when you get the error Requires installation of untrusted packages

How to fix VirtualBox apt updating when you get the error Requires installation of untrusted packages

When updating VirtualBox on our Ubuntu server today I received the following error: Requires installation of untrusted package. The action would require the installation of packages from not authenticated sources.

It turns out that the authentication key for the repository had been deleted. Run the following command to resolve this problem Read more about How to fix VirtualBox apt updating when you get the error Requires installation of untrusted packages

How to search for a package in Debian and Ubuntu

How to search for a package in Debian and Ubuntu

If you need to install a package such as mysql server you generally use the apt-get install <package name> command. The trick is getting the package name right. To find the package name, perform a search using the apt-cache command. The syntax is as follows:

apt-cache search mysql

This will return a list of packages which reference mysql. You’ll notice this is a very long list because it’ll include packages which include applications which use mysql databases. To narrow down your search you can use the following command: Read more about How to search for a package in Debian and Ubuntu