It’s probably about time that I drew attention to Ubuntu’s The Fridge. While the strap line says “News for Human Beings”, it seems to be the place to find out about development releases of the said Linux distribution. Today, there’s a new alpha release of Intrepid Ibex (8.10) out and they have the details. As for me, I’ll stick to updating my 8.10 installation using Synaptic rather than going through the whole risky process of a complete installation following a download of the CD image. Saying that, it would be nice to see the System Monitor indicating which alpha release I have. I didn’t notice anything very dramatic after I did the update, apart maybe from the hiding away of boot messages at system startup and shutdown or the appearance of a button for changing display settings in the panel atop the desktop.
Tag Archive for Synaptic
A fallback installation routine?
In a previous sustained spell of Linux meddling, the following installation routine was one that I encountered rather too often when RPM’s didn’t do what I required of them (having a SUSE distro in a world dominated by a Red Hat standard didn’t make things any easier…):
tar xzvf progname.tar.gz
cd progname
The first line extracts from a gziped tarball and the second one changes into the new directory created by the extraction. For bzipped files use:
tar xjvf progname.tar.bz2
The next three lines below configure, compile and install the package, running the command in its own shell.
./configure
make
su -c make install
Yes, the procedure is a bit convoluted but it would have been fine if it always worked. My experience was that the process was a far from foolproof one. For instance, an unsatisfied dependency is all that is needed to stop you in your tracks. Attempting to install a GNOME application on a KDE-based system is as good a way to encounter this result as any. Other horrid errors also played havoc with hopeful plans from time to time.
It shouldn’t surprise you to find that I will be staying away from the compilation/installation business with my main Ubuntu system. Synaptic Package Manager and its satisfactory dependency resolution fulfill my needs well and there is the Update Manager too; I’ll be leaving it to Canonical to do the testing and make the decisions regarding what is ready for my PC as they maintain their software repositories. My past tinkering often created a mess and I’ll be leaving that sort of experimentation for the safe confines of a virtual machine from now on…
Setting up a test web server on Ubuntu
Installing all of the bits and pieces is painless enough so long as you know what’s what; Synaptic does make it thus. Interestingly, Ubuntu’s default installation is a lightweight affair with the addition of any additional components involving downloading the packages from the web. The whole process is all very well integrated and doesn’t make you sweat every time you to install additional software. In fact, it resolves any dependencies for you so that those packages can be put in place too; it lists them, you select them and Synaptic does the rest.
Returning to the job in hand, my shopping list included Apache, Perl, PHP and MySQL, the usual suspects in other words. Perl was already there as it is on many UNIX systems so installing the appropriate Apache module was all that was needed. PHP needed the base installation as well as the additional Apache module. MySQL needed the full treatment too, though its being split up into different pieces confounded things a little for my tired mind. Then, there were the MySQL modules for PHP to be set in place too.
The addition of Apache preceded all of these but I have left it until now to describe its configuration, something that took longer than for the others; the installation itself was as easy as it was for the others. However, what surprised me were the differences in its configuration set up when compared with Windows. Same software, different operating system and they have set up the configuration files differently. I have no idea why they did this and it makes no sense at all to me; we are only talking about text files after all. The first difference is that the main configuration file is called apache2.conf in Ubuntu rather than httpd.conf as in Windows. Like its Windows counterpart, Ubuntu’s Apache does uses subsidiary configuration files. However, there is an additional layer of configurability added courtesy of a standard feature of UNIX operating systems: symbolic links. Rather than having a single folder with the all configuration files stored therein, there are two pairs of folders, one pair for module configuration and another for site settings: mods-available/mods-enabled and sites-available/sites-enabled, respectively. In each pair, there is a folder with all of the files and another containing symbolic links. It is the presence of a symbolic link for a given configuration file in the latter that activates it. I learned all this when trying to get mod_rewrite going and changing the web server folder from the default to somewhere less susceptible to wrecking during a re-installation or, heaven forbid, a destructive system crash. It’s unusual but it does work, even if it takes that little bit longer to get things sorted out when you first meet up with it.
Apart from the Apache set up and finding the right things to install, getting a test web server up and running was a fairly uneventful process. All’s working well now and I’ll be taking things forward from here; making website Perl scripts compatible with their new world will be one of the next things that need to be done.