Stefan Helander

Windows 10 desktop disappeared

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A Windows 10 user contacted me because the desktop had disappeared.

The first thing to check is if Windows is in “Tablet mode” which disables the desktop.

  • Go to the Control panel
  • Search for “tablet” and click on “Table mode settings”
  • In the “When I sign in” change from “Use the apropriate mode for my hardware” to “Use desktop mode”
  • Log out and log back in again

If this doesn’t help the user profile might have become broken. In this case, the solution is (description below is just short notes taken from my memory):

  • Go to the Control panel and select accounts
  • Create a new account
  • Using a user with administrative rights, copy the content from the users folders like desktop, documents etc to the new user’s folder.
  • Log in using the new user
Ubuntu DesktopCanonical Ltd
Stefan Helander

Ubuntu 14.04, 16.04 and 17.04 Unity, Dash and Launcher missing

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If you end up missing the menu etc in Ubuntu 14.04, 16.04 and 17.04, i.e. you only see the desktop but nothing more. You can’t even restart the machine.

It can be resolved like this:

  • Right click on the desktop and select “Start a new terminal”
  • In the terminal window run the following commands;
    sudo apt-get update
    sudo apt-get install --reinstall ubuntu-desktop
    sudo apt-get install --reinstall unity
    sudo shutdown -r now

 

PrestaShop
Stefan Helander

Random product added to cart along with selected product in PrestaShop [solved]

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Using PrestaShop 1.6.1.18, this was an older shop that had been offline for a couple of years. It had been upgraded in steps from PrestaShop 1.4 via 1.5 to 1.6. While testing it before relaunch of the shop a problem was discovered. Sometimes when adding a product to the shopping cart, another random product was added. When testing the shop in incognito/private mode this happened more frequent.

It turned out to be a discrepancy between cart ID:s in the two tables ps_cart and ps_cart_product.

Solution:

  1. Use phpMyAdmin or similar to open your PrestaShop database.
  2. Go to the table ps_cart_product, make sure it is ordered by the id_cart column and go to the last page.
  3. Make a note of the highest id_cart value.
  4. Go to the table ps_cart, make sure it is ordered by the id_cart column and go to the last page.
  5. Compare this table’s highest id_cart value with the one you found in ps_cart_product. It will probably be a lower number and this is what is causing the problem. When a visitor puts something in a cart, a new row is created in ps_cart with id_cart value auto incremented but there is already a row in ps_cart_product with this id_cart value from a previous visitor.
  6. Add a new row to ps_cart and in the id_cart field enter the number of the highest value you found in ps_cart_product. Then save the row.
  7. You will probably see some error message about invalid or missing fields but that will be ok as long as the row is saved.

 

PrestaShop
Stefan Helander

How to move a PrestaShop 1.6 from one domain to another (resolving redirect problems)

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There are several descriptions online on how to do this but in one occasion, even though I followed the instructions carefully it kept redirecting me to the old domain name. In my particular case the culprit was that the site used file system cache which was active before the move.

The following procedure fixed my problem. The base of the instructions come from the PrestaShop site with my additions below.

  1. Put the site in Maintenance mode.
  2. Copy all files from the old site (domain) to the new using for example a FTP program.
  3. Dump the old site database to a file and import the database on the new server.
  4. Edit config/settings.inc.php and update the values for _DB_SERVER, _DB_NAME, _DB_USER, _DB_PASSWD and you might need to adjust _PS_DIRECTORY value.
  5. Using phpMyAdmin, go to the table ps_store_url and update the record regarding domain name and physical uri.
  6. Using phpMyAdmin, go to the table ps_configuration and find the records for column name with the records for PS_SHOP_DOMAIN, PS_SHOP_DOMAIN_SSL and __PS_BASE_URI__ and update the values corresponding to the new domain name and base uri.
  7. Using FTP (or other preferred method) clear all content except index.php of the ‘/cache/smarty/compile’ and ‘/cache/smarty/cache’ directories.
  8. Using FTP (or other preferred method) clear all content of the ‘/cache/cachefs’ directory.
  9. Log in to the backend and disable Maintenance mode.
Stefan Helander

How to convert a certificate PFX file to CRT/KEY using openssl

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Your PFX certificate file is protected with a password. It can be converted to CRT and KEY files using SSL:

openssl pkcs12 -in certfile.pfx -nocerts -out keyfile-encrypted.key

When you enter this command you will be asked to type in the pfx file password in order to extract the key. You will be asked to enter a passphrase for the encrypted key. The key will be stored in keyfile-encrypted.key.

The exported keyfile is encrypted but you might need it in unencrypted format. To unencrypt the key, do:

openssl rsa -in keyfile-encrypted.key -out keyfile.key

You will be asked for the passphrase that you entered in the previous step. The unencrypted key will be stored in keyfile.key.

Then it is time to extract the certificate:

openssl pkcs12 -in certfile.pfx -clcerts -nokeys -out certfile.crt

Again, you will need to enter the pfx file password in order to extract the certificate. The certificate will be stored in certfile.crt.

Stefan Helander

Anchor links does not scroll to the correct position

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There are several issues that can cause local anchor links to not scroll to the right position. The first thing to check is if you have an id-tag that has the same name as the anchor. In this case the browser will scroll to the id position instead. The solution is to name the anchor and id with different names.

Example:

<div name="myanchor">
<p>Some random text</p>
</div>
<a href="#myanchor">Go to some random text</a>

The above example will behave as expected.

But in this example the link will scroll to the h1 instead of the div:

<h1 id="myanchor">
<div>
<p>Some other random text</p>
</div>
<div name="myanchor">
<p>Some random text</p>
</div>
<a href="#myanchor">Go to some random text</a>

To avoid this, make sure the anchors (name) and id have different names.

There are also other sitiuations where the local anchor does not scroll correctly covered in this article.

Gogodigital Cookie Consent for Joomla! plugin
Stefan Helander

Gogodigital Cookie Consent plugin for Joomla! doesn’t display custom message [solution]

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Using Gogodigital Cookie Consent plugin for Joomla! version 3.0.2. In the plugin configuration a custom message and submit label was entered and saved but on the frontend the popup only displays the built in message and button label.

Solution: It turns out there is a bug when the message entered has a newline (return). If you write the text in one row without any line breaks the problem will not occur.

MySQLOracle Corporation
Stefan Helander

MySQL not sorting swedish characters ÅÄÖ correct [solved]

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Problem: When using ORDER BY or GROUP BY, the swedish characters Å,Ä and Ö is sorted as A and O.

Solution: add COLLATE utf8_swedish_ci to your ORDER BY or GROUP BY, for example:

SELECT field1,field2 FROM table1 ORDER BY field1 ASC

should be changed to:

SELECT field1,field2 FROM table1 ORDER BY field1 COLLATE utf8_swedish_ci ASC

RS!Form Pro (site screenshot)RS!Joomla
Stefan Helander

RSForm! Pro and reCaptcha plugin not working [solved]

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Using RSForm! Pro together with the RS!Form Pro reCaptcha plugin stopped working, the reCaptcha does not show up in the form anymore.

Inspecting the page shows errors like “Unexpected token <” on line 2 and further down complains that RSFormProReCAPTCHAv2 is not defined.

The Unexpected token error is probably caused by a line in the <head> section calling a non-existing javascript (i.e. just links to the site root), like: <script src=”/?cc86e17febb09de1768c47283dc17a9b” type=”text/javascript”></script>. This line is originating from a plugin.

It turns out this is problem occured after upgrading to RSForm! Pro 2.0.12 and using the reCaptcha plugin.

The simple solution was to download and reinstall the current “Google No Captcha ReCAPTCHA 1.52.1” from the downloads section at RSJoomla (you might need to login to get to your memberships downloads section).

Note! Just using the Joomla Extensions Update to try to update the plugin will solve the problem. You need to download the plugin and install it.

PrestaShop
Stefan Helander

Error 500 after PrestaShop upgrade from 1.5 to 1.6

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Upgrading a PrestaShop 1.5 to 1.6 resulted in Error 500 when visiting the shop frontend. During the upgrade I had selected to disable all non native modules, replace theme with default theme and updating all emails.

I tried every trick in  the book, like cleaning the cache, disable all caching and compression, etc but it didn’t help.

The problem was solved like this:

  • Go to Preferences -> Themes
  • Make sure the default-bootstrap theme is selected
  • Click on the Advanced options button for the theme
  • It turned out the setting for Folder was not set to any folder (no radio button selected). Select default-bootstrap folder and Save

This solved the problem for me.