The laptop now has two versions of linux on it – I have installed suse 7.2 on a virtual machine within virtual PC on top of windows, which works surprisingly well and a red hat linux 8.0 on a seperate partition, which I am also impressed with.
The Linux install on top of windows might sound stupid to some people, but the idea is that I can experiment with it, even setting up several virtual machines and simulate networking between them, all the while without having to reboot the host machine, and being able to surf and use newsgroups when I get stuck.
The “proper” red hat linux install is great, but I haven’t used it much because I am hooked on certain windows only apps at the moment…
I downloaded a trial of this today:-
http://www.macromedia.com/software/contribute/
It’s a client based collaborative web authoring system. I haven’t had a proper experiment with it yet, but looks like it might be a useful alternative to a “proper” server based CMS for giving people the ability to update content on their own sites.
well back to square one… I have rebuilt the machine with a new drive and treated myself to some more RAM while I was at it. It currently has just one partition, running win 2k. There *will* be a linux partition again one rainy day – good job I have had a practice run and logged it all here to avoid repeating mistakes!
well… the hard drive started to play up on sunday, failed on wednesday. Luckily I have backed up all the important files and will be starting from scratch with a new drive ASAP
The reason I haven’t done much with this web log recently is that I have found myself needing applications such as Flash (for Flash!) and Dreamweaver, Photoshop and fireworks (for productivity in building web sites) which are not available under linux*. I had settled nicely into using Linux for almost everything when I was concentrating on “raw” coding, but recently I have been doing a lot of web and CMS work, so much so that I haven’t bothered to boot into Linux for some time. I did experiment with having a seperate windows and Linux box, but the spare box wasn’t up to much so it is now abandoned. I will keep the linux partition… but at the moment until Macromedia produce some linux apps windows is my main platform. don’t hate me!
* it is now theoretically possible to run most of these using wine/crossover office, but I haven’t tried yet.
I have installed and reinstalled mysql a couple of times but still haven’t got a functioning version. First of all I installed the version which comes with suse 8.0, via Yast but mysqld died as soon as it started, so I tried installing from the downloaded files and got the same problem. I tried modifying ownership of all the relevant directories, but this hasn’t helped so far…
I know this is a bit vague but I dont have the machine with me and would rather not mention versions, file names and error messages at all if I can’t be accurate!
I’ve installed php, mainly so I could stick a copy of phpost – web based pop mail client on it to try out (Very nice it is too). The install went fine – this was an install via Yast after all – and then I just had to stop and start apache*. PHP was then working serving within apache, so php scripts can be executed from within the same directory and via the same port as static pages.
*I’ve now discovered that you can use the “apachectl” application to do this:- log into a shell under root and type either ‘apachectl start’ or ‘apchectl stop’ (without the quotes).
I downloaded the MS Web Matrix asp.net tool yesterday, and I have to say i’m impressed. I get the feeling that it has been released because your average web developer does not have access to the prohibitively expensive Visual Studio.net. The tool includes a development server which can be used instead of IIS. Its a nice lightweight program with drag and drop GUI widgets, HTML, and code views and probably a bit more. The idea is that it is a community supported product – there’s an associated forum at www.asp.net.
Jakarta Tomcat is now installed and works through port 8080.
I got Apache running this morning before work, I had already installed but hadn’t figured out how to start it. In the end I found the command I needed in Running Linux (Matt Welsh, Matthias Kalle Dalheimer, Lar Kaufman -O’Reilly). I opened a shell with root permissions and typed the command:-
(location of httpd) -f (location of httpd.conf)
obviously replacing the (location of..) bracketted bits with the correct file paths
I haven’t changed any of the configuration settings yet – i’m using the default settings provided in the suse distribution, which (unlike windows) means most features are disabled by default, so you can enable them as required when you understand what they do, rather than scramble frantically around trying to lock potentially vulnerable things off which you don’t want or don’t need.
Next Project: Tomcat (for running JSP?)
