Ubuntu to the rescue

Alot of you have commented how quiet I’ve been over the past couple of weeks, its been a busy few weeks with 3 site launches, the purchase of a new house, and an impending holiday its easy to understand why, at one point I thought my head was going to explode - literally!

None of this was helped when the motherboard on my development machine decided to expire, but these things are meant to happen.

After getting my windows machine back up and running, I breathed a sigh of relief and took stock. For a while I’ve had a Ubuntu box sat around doing nothing, so this morning I decided to get a proper development box on the go,despite a great weather forecast.

Well where do I start, within a couple of hours I’ve got a fully loaded development box which wouldn’t look out of place at an ISP or web host this little beauty now has the following installed:

• Apache 2.0
• Mongrel
• PHP 5
• Ruby on Rails
• MySQL 5
• Postfix
• BIND9
• Proftdp
• Webalizer
• SSH
• SSL
• Samba

After having hardly touched a box with any flavour of *nix for over a year it feels great to be back.

Ubuntu was the obvious choice and I felt assured after the initial installation. When compared to a distro like Gentoo there is just no comparision, Ubuntu has great package management, documentation and community it just means that you can get things done rather than having to worry about the complexities of the o/s all the time.

Thats not to say the windows machine is going to get ditched just yet, but certainly all development will be Ubuntu powered, and with power of ssh I can easily administer the machine.

Chris you were right, everyone needs a little Ubuntu in their life!

P.S if you’re thinking about replicating a similar set up, these two links will prove invaluable:

http://www.howtoforge.org/perfect_setup_ubuntu_6.06

http://paulgoscicki.com/archives/2005/09/ruby-on-rails-on-ubuntu/