chamilto0516's Journal: Fun with 'Install Everything'

I have finally started using my GNU/Linux system again. I briefly used it once prior to now as a file and print server on a large project while at Deloitte Consulting. Since I rolled-off the project it mostly has been sitting in the basement pretending to be an extra network attached hard drive which is probably not much of a glamorous life for even this class of machine.

Recently, I decided to put dotProject on it and update it the OS at the same time. I installed RedHat Fedora Core 4 and for the first time, clicked Install Everything. Install took a while and I didn't know what I was going to get. When It was done, all the prerequisite software for dotProject was there. After an hour of fiddling with Apache and MySQL security, I had dotProject up and running. There are some things like Gantt charts that do not work yet but I will get to those. One thing that didn't work was email. I have been afraid of Sendmail so I neglect to do anything with it. The important thing was that dotProject was working!

I am also looking at putting a Wiki up at work and now that I had a working installation of the magic trio (Apache, PHP and MySQL), Installing Wikka was a piece of cake (after more fiddling with MySQL security again). Once you have LAMP (Linux Apache MySQL PHP/Python/Perl), you have the keys to the world of easy free computing. It is like if you have fuel, oxygen and heat then no matter where you go next, you are going to create fire.

But now, I was on a roll. Since I really was using this Linux box now as a server and less a workstation (X is kinda slow on it) I started to think about the UI of this box. An old Linux Journal article pointed me to webmin. It installed easy and now I was really cooking. With webmin, I was able to use/configure/modify cron jobs, imap, fetchmail, MySQL (no more mucking about with security for me), Samba, Sendmail, Squid and the system time.

I even felt so good about all this that I updated my Linux Counter info and installed the auto-update script. I am sure now that this box useful that it will start to go down on a regular basis.

I will keep the blog updated on my Wiki studies.