UBUNTU

Have been playing around with UBUNTU and am totally surprised, they are getting close to making it usable by John and Suzy six pack, my alias for the people that want a computer to just work. Somebody that Microsoft has been targeting since the beginning of time.

Of course I have different needs, have a home server, play toy, and want to start doing local HTML and email. Coming from the Wintel world, its a huge paradigm shift, but i am getting there.

I installed the Ububtu Feisty Fawn server edition with LAMP on an old box, plugged it into the router and was (un)officially on the net from home. Now all I have to do is get the POSTFIX and all its friends to work closely together.

Went to Go Daddy and got the cheapest domain I could, whatididwas.info($1.99). Then over to ZoneEdit and signed up for dns hosting (free) and pointed to to the IP that Comcast gave me.

Comcast manages to assign dynamic IP's with a long subscription period, at least 48 hours, and the ip is based on the networks cards address - so for all intents I have a static IP address. So there is no need to go to all the trouble to set up dynamin DNS scripts on Ubuntu. If it ever does change - its easy enough to change @ ZoneEdit.

I installed WAMP5 on the Windows development box to test scripts. I am not a fan of VI and decided to use what i know, for the time being.

Ubuntu server is quick and fast but I am not a fan of the command line. So I installed the Gnome desktop. Then I went to the System-> Administration-> Services and unchecked the box next to Graphic Login Manager. Now the system boots to the command line, I type in startx to get to the Gnome desktop should I need to, and logout from it to get back to the command line and much better performance.

I am going to (re)install Webmin so I can remotely manage the box easily. I just have to stay away from letting it install anything - apt-get is the only was that I can safely expect to get something uninstalled after I have managed to really frell up its configuration and restart with a clean slate.


Stay tuned - film at 11 (on YouTube :-)