SuperJason’s Personal Blog

I’m always trying to give Linux an honest shot at winning me over.  I’m not a big fan of paying Microsoft massive amounts of money for every little thing I need.  I’ve been particularly interested in Ubuntu lately, for the sole reason that it has a massive community.  Each time I’ve tried it, I’ve tried the live version inside of a virtual machine, so that it’s isolated and controlled.

Now that Ubuntu has version 6.06 out, I gave it a try as usual.  I was very impressed that you can power up the live CD, and then perform the install while still using the OS!  Very cool.  It gives me something to do during the install.  The complete install took about 15 minutes, which was incredible.  Once I fired it up, it was very responsive, and impressively identified all of my hardware.

By day, I’m a Microsoft .NET software engineer.  By night, I’m a tinkeraholic.  Ubuntu desktop is great, but it just doesn’t do what I want it to do.  I just use way too many pieces of software that only run on Windows.  Microsoft Money, Visual Studio, Outlook, TortoiseSVN, etc.  That’s also the reason that I can’t really recommend it to anyone I know.  If I ever were to install it on someone elses machine, I would inevitably get a call asking why they can’t get their Scooby Doo game to run, or they can’t get Firefox to correctly show SomeCrappySite.com.

Anyway, even though I know I can’t really switch, it doesn’t lower my curiosity.  However this time when I was reading about the latest version, I noticed that there is a server version available.  The memory and hard drive requirements are very low, and it’s very stripped down.  I’ve gotten quite a bit of time to use it, and I must say it is AWESOME.  It’s as little or as much as you make of it, which is great for a server environment.  Installing software is actually EASIER and BETTER than in Windows.  To install Subversion for example, you can simply type “sudo apt-get install subversion”, wait about 3 seconds, and boom, you’re done.  It’s that rediculously easy.

The simplicity is all do to the fact that Ubuntu is a distribution of Debian.  Debian has a major advantage which is their package manager, which makes all this installation magic so great.  There are literally 20,000+ packages out there, all ready for you to start exploring.  If the install needs input from you, it will ask you during the install.  If you ever upgrade that software later, it will remember your answers, and make everything as automatic as possible.

In some future posts, I want to go over some of the great things you can do with Linux (that I have done), in the following topics

• Setting up a virtual, modular server, using pre-built VMware appliances, or building your own
• Setting up a virtual router using a program called Monowall
• Remotely administrating your Linux server, using a web-based interface known as Webmin
• Setting up VMware server, and installing the VMware tools in your Ubuntu virtual machine