My New Linux Crashed and Burned

I'm still not sure why but the Ubuntu upgrade I did a couple of days ago died on me today- an i-bus error, it just hung during boot up. I couldn't do a fix from the install CD as I had upgraded over the internet. So I downloaded (use Bittorrent- took me 10 mins each!) and installed a few distros to choose my favourite. I like Ubuntu but I'm still not a Unity fan; although it's the default Ubuntu desktop GUI I find it's harder to do admin stuff.

I thought I'd try kubuntu (the KDE version) which isn't bad but I prefer Gnome, actually the classic version but I'm warming to 3. The main use of my Linux box is as a local web server first then program on Linux second so I next tried the Ubuntu-server version. If you like command line Linux, you'll love that! However with just two sudo apt-get commands, you can upgrade it to the desktop version and also get Gnome.

After that I installed and ran the synaptic package manager and used it to get Apache/PHP and Samba. From a command line prompt I wgetted webmin (from webmin.com). It's a very handy utility to configure apache and Samba and most everything else. There is a trick you need logging in the first time as Ubuntu does not have a root user account and you have to run a changepass utility.

Anyway once Webmin was working and Samba was set up, I mapped my locally networked windows box w: to the web server root directory /var/www. Finally I had to take ownership of /var/www . By default it's owned by root and read only but doing a terminal command sudo with the chown account to my login account sorted that. Phew.

As a programmer you don't have to know how to do these things, but having an understanding and being brave enough to experiment can be quite rewarding. It can also waste valuable weekend development time...!