Mel's Mini-Projects

KDE Plasma Installation on External SSD

This project documents installing KDE Plasma on an external SSD with Ubuntu, including all trial-and-error steps, errors encountered, and solutions.

Timeline & Challenges

• Initial installation failed due to /var being full on the internal disk
• Had to adjust partitioning manually, ensuring the external SSD was used as root
• Encountered BusyBox shell and UUID/GRUB boot issues
• Flashed Ubuntu USB correctly, reinstalled, and successfully booted KDE Plasma
• Configured NVIDIA drivers and verified GUI scaling and refresh rate

Lessons Learned

• Disk partitioning matters more than you realize
• GRUB and UUIDs can easily break boot if external disks are moved
• Patience + careful logs help recover from kernel/init errors

PHP & Nginx Debugging

This project documents configuring PHP 8.3 FPM with nginx and resolving 500 Internal Server Errors caused by parse mistakes in PHP files.

Problem

The test file phpinfo.php was throwing:

PHP Parse error:  syntax error, unexpected token "<", expecting end of file
    

Nginx was downloading the PHP file instead of rendering it.

Steps Taken

• Checked file ownership and permissions: www-data:www-data, 644
• Configured php.ini to log all PHP errors
• Created /var/log/php_errors.log with correct permissions
• Restarted PHP-FPM and verified logging

php.ini Logging Settings

display_errors = Off
display_startup_errors = Off
error_reporting = E_ALL
log_errors = On
error_log = /var/log/php_errors.log
    

Outcome

• Parse errors now appear in the log instead of crashing nginx
• Safe and persistent logging for future PHP projects
• Testing with sudo tail -f /var/log/php_errors.log works in real-time

Example test: phpinfo.php