Now, I’m not normally one to upgrade every time a new version of WordPress is released, especially a minor point version. But the WP developers seemed concerned enough to cross post this on all their blogs, so I decided it might actually be necessary. A tiny bit irritating, as I’d just upgraded virtually everything to WordPress 2.1.1, but what can you do?

Anyway, I was very pleased to stumble across Ajay’s neat instructions on how to upgrade WordPress via SSH shell. I’ve done a couple of upgrades now and neither have taken any more than 5 minutes each. My previous process was to download the latest version, unzip it into my Dreamweaver site and upload the whole thing again. This could be pretty time intensive, as you can imagine.

I did spend a lot of time trying to get SSH to work, on sites hosted on both Media Temple and Dreamhost (aff). If you’re new to SSH like I am, let me save you a lot of time: Most hosts don’t enable SSH be default, you’ve got to enable it yourself. In Dreamhost, you enable it through the user management on the panel. In Media Temple, it depends on what package you have, so check their knowledge base.

Anyway, do take the time to learn Ajay’s SSH technique – it’ll save you hours in the long run and it’s such an elegant solution to managing WordPress. Of course, someone has to mention SVN at this point…..

I decided to take the bull by the horns, and this evening decided to do a little digging around the subject. As with all things Open Source, there’s more than one way to skin this particular cat, and a quick search reveals a number of utilities claiming to be of use accessing Linux partitions from various versions of Windows.

After looking at a few different utils, I decided to settle on Ext2 IFS for Windows, which is a small but nifty tool that allows you read and write access to your Linux drives. A lot of tools only offer read access, which is great but a bit limiting if you need to edit a file stored on Linux.

It also allows you to assign a drive letter to the Linux partition so that you can easily identify the partition, access it through Windows Explorer and all your standard Windows programs:

It installs a pure kernel mode file system driver Ext2fs.sys, which actually extends the Windows NT/2000/XP/2003 operating system to include the Ext2 file system. Since it is executed on the same software layer at the Windows NT operating system core like all of the native file system drivers of Windows (for instance NTFS, FASTFAT, or CDFS for Joliet/ISO CD-ROMs), all applications can access directly to Ext2 volumes. Ext2 volumes get drive letters (for instance G:). Files, and directories of an Ext2 volume appear in file dialogs of all applications. There is no need to copy files from or to Ext2 volumes in order to work with them.

The best bit of this utility? It doesn’t even require a reboot!

The beauty of this is that I can now access my Windows network from within Kubuntu and I can also access my Linux directories from Windows, which means the cost and risk of running Kubuntu is reduced further. If you’re teetering on the edge of running Linux, give this a go.