It Couldn’t Possibly be That Easy December 3, 2008
Posted by jasonslamp in Uncategorized.Tags: cli, dog, installation
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So I installed Ubuntu last night. For the most part it seemed really straightforward: pop in the disc, run the memory test and disc integrity check utilities, then choose install and follow the menu prompts. I got a little confused at the disk partition screen, but decided that choosing “use entire disk” seemed like a good option:
So far so good. And then I got to this screen:
I almost couldn’t believe my eyes .. it’s giving me the option to just install it as a LAMP server? Just like that? It couldn’t possibly be that easy! The dog was excited:
(really just excited because I'm waving a chew toy in front of him)
I finished the rest of the steps, ejected the CD, and nervously waited as the computer booted into Ubuntu for the first time. And then this came up:
A command line interface. For which I know no commands. Hmmmmmmmmm.
Time to look for instructions and do a little reading.
Choosing a Flavor December 2, 2008
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So with the computer ready to go, next up is an operating system. And again I’m not in Kansas anymore. There are more flavors of Linux distributions than at Sebastian Joe’s, and I don’t have a clue how to judge them on their merits.
My first attempt at asking for advice on this actually came this past Saturday night. My neighbors, Eric and Doreen, were having their annual Ham Day party. Their tradition for celebrating their wedding anniversary is to deep fry a whole bunch of food, invite a whole bunch of people over, and generally feast and drink until the wee hours. It was my first time at one of their partes, but hopefully not my last – lots of fun, lots of beer, and they live a block away.
Anyway, I stopped by Ham Day very late in the evening due to the fact that waiting tables is still how I spend many of my weekends. Sometime around 2:30am I asked my neighbor if he had any experience configuring a LAMP server, to which laughter ensued. Granted it was probably a funny question even in sober daylight hours, since Doreen and Eric built a project management website for which Eric is the programmer. (I probably had the least geek cred of anyone at this party, though I did my best to not let that make me feel inferior.) Asking then which flavor of Linux was best, he said Ubuntu or some other one. I don’t remember because Ubuntu was the only of the two names I recognized, and .. well, I was drinking. Eric’s programmer friend agreed with Ubuntu, and they quickly concurred that it would probably be my easiest option.
With that golden advice in hand, I still felt the need for some due diligence on the subject – if only because something deep inside of me inherently doesn’t trust drunken advice obtained at parties in the wee hours of the morning. Although I do have to admit that for me, due diligence really just means typing “best linux flavor for lamp” into Google and seeing what comes up. And actually that doesn’t disappoint. There are plenty of discussions on the web covering this very subject, and plenty of recommendations out there: CentOS, Debian, Fedora, RedHat, Solaris, Mandriva.. But a running theme I found in about a half-dozen discussions was that Ubuntu probably offers the easiest configuration and most readily available support community. Sounds like a winner!
So, the internets and my drunk friends agree: Ubuntu it is.
Although I have to say, too, that this comment offers me the most encouragement: “Just about any flavor works well. I don’t think there is a right or wrong here.”
And a nice side effect of the Google search was stumbling onto this tutorial. Which led me to search for more tutorials, where I found this, this, this, this and this. And of course I’ve done nothing more than skim these before my blood pressure starts to rise as I realize that each tutorial is for a different version of Ubuntu and I’m not sure where to begi…… deep breath … go to the Ubutntu website … there’s a server edition … download the latest version … just dive in.
Downloading now. Heading to the gym. More later.
Getting Started December 1, 2008
Posted by jasonslamp in Uncategorized.Tags: dinner, hardware
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The first step to any big project is almost always the hardest. But in this case it’s pretty straightforward: I need a computer.
This is actually an easy choice: my old Athlon XP has been sitting in the basement since I stripped all the nice parts off of it for the Core 2 Duo in my living room today. The processor runs at 1.7 Ghz, 256MB RAM, and a 10 GB hard drive. Not exactly a state-of-the-art box, but it will suffice for this purpose.
So I dug it out tonight, opened it up, blew out the mouse poop with compressed air (ew .. yeah, I know). Then to make sure the pin on the hard drive is set to master, hook it up, press the power button, and …. crap. What do eight beeps from the BIOS mean? Video card. Sure enough it’s not seated right. Fix that, try again …. it’s allliiiiiiive! *clap my hands and pump my fist for victory*
Old computer, revived from the basement
In between all of this, I also worked on my other project for the evening…
Roasted red and yellow peppers, mixed with olive oil and garlic, tossed with bowtie pasta. ..mmmmmmmm..
OK, so to recap the evening:
- working computer, check
- dinner, check
Next up .. an operating system.
Introduction December 1, 2008
Posted by jasonslamp in Uncategorized.Tags: about
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I have gazed out at the open source ocean for long enough – time to take the plunge.
Four years ago I didn’t have the slightest clue this is where I’d be now. On December 1st, 2004 I was underemployed, and I had few mentionable job skills. Waiting tables wasn’t bringing in enough money to keep the student loans paid for the liberal arts degree that didn’t seem to be getting me anywhere. But that month I caught a break. A co-worker got a day job as a recruiter for “not really a temp agency, more of a placement firm.” Or in other words, as I soon found out, a temp agency.
Over the next year I discovered a few things. For one, it turns out I like money. A steady paycheck, even if only for a few weeks at a time, added on top of part time work is livable. For two, it doesn’t take too much to succeed in office culture. Just show up on time, apply a few organizational skills, have a positive attitude and they love you. (The first of those things was always the hardest part for me.) Finally, a little bit of technical literacy goes a long way. And I’ve always been a bit of a geek.
Three years ago the nonprofit I was temping for hired me on as their full-time receptionist and admin assistant. It’s a good place, but with lots of room for administrative improvement. And I welcomed the challenge. Through responsibilities came opportunities, and vice-versa. Being tasked with processing mass mailings gave me the chance to establish new procedures utilizing e-mail and mail merge. Getting the responsibility for running lists out of the database gave me the opportunity to cut my teeth using SQL. Having a knack for knowing how software works made me the de facto help desk for co-workers. Things just clicked, and eventually I got promoted.
A year ago I was given the title of IT Manager. My goal ever since has been to become qualified for this position. And by-and-large I think I’m doing OK. Our reliance on consultants has been diminished, we’ve established a technology plan, instituted a LANbook, maintenance and error log, and I have an ever-growing body of procedures on file. Most of my learning has been through hands-on experience, with the help of some wonderful nonprofit assistance, a few good books, and completing the online coursework pre-requisite to obtaining my MCSA designation.
As you may have guessed from the MCSA reference, we are a Microsoft shop. As a c3 nonprofit the software is extremely affordable, and in practice it works very well for us. Office is a the gold standard for daily productivity, our Exchange server works great, Great Plains holds up the accounting tasks, and we even host our own website using IIS. A very Microsoft-centric shop. So it made lots of sense a year-and-a-half ago when I led one of my first big tech initiatives by implementing SharePoint.
We deployed SharePoint for two purposes: As an internal portal for collaborating on the business of the organization, and as an external-facing community website hosting our blog, calendar and more. Only one of these has been a smashing success. Well, I shouldn’t be so pessimistic. The sweethearts I work with think our Community Portal is just great. But as the administrator I know the shortcomings of the SharePoint platform for it – no CAPTCHA to stop the flood of comment spam, extraordinarily difficult modification of page layouts, and don’t get me started on the workaround it takes to embed a YouTube video.. It’s clear that the content management capabilities of the SharePoint 3.0 platform just aren’t well suited to that purpose, and it’s time to move on.
So here I am, looking at where to go for a content management platform. And open source is the way to go. WordPress is clearly emerging as the gold standard blog publishing platform. A CMS like Drupal or Joomla could give us the platform we need to host streaming media and document libraries. MediaWiki offers some intriguing possibilities for collaboration. All of these potential solutions are said to work far better on on a LAMP (Linux-Apache-MySQL-PHP) server than in a Windows environment. Doing this the right way means starting from scratch with a whole new platform. And for someone who’s not averse to a challenge, this is actually pretty exciting.
