Jason’s Linux Learning Journal

OK, it’s been a while since I wrote here. In the past two-and-a-half months I’ve gotten through the holidays, another birthday, hit my goal of hitting the gym 12 times last month and spent a week in Mexico. Oh yeah, I also finished those books and got both Drupal and WordPress running on the computer. 

Both books were easy reads and well suited to my skill level, and while they definitely don’t make me an expert – I do feel like I’ve got a grasp on some of the basics, and that’s a foundation to build on.

A couple of lessons I’ve learned along the way:

• When trying to reboot the Apache server, trying the command sudo reboot reboots the computer. This does however accomplish rebooting the web server
• I don’t remember why I initially had to sudo firefox (think it was to have write access to download a file directly into a directory), but my homepage, bookmarks, etc, seem to have permanently assigned to the root user. Am now launching Firefox as root every time in order to access them.

I have to say I’m really digging Linux. The flexibility and power is pretty awesome in comparison to what I’m used to with Windows. The flip side of course is that its less forgiving and there are fewer roadblocks and checks against falling down the rabbit hole. (Such as accidentally launching into a shell environment with no clue how to return to the GUI short of rebooting the machine.) But I’ve hit the point where its up-and-running, and serving its purpose as a dev server. So my focus has now shifted to the really fun part .. developing prototype websites with open source Content Management Platforms!