Moved
Well, a project that started three weeks ago is finally (almost) done. I recently moved from a house that contained myself and six roommates to a single studio by myself. I moved into my new place three and a half weeks ago, and for some reason it took me this long to finally get everything moved out of the old place and into the new. Other than one car full of miscellaneous stuff, I am finally all done.
It is a little interesting living by myself now. For the past year I lived in a basement room in a huge house where there was always someone else home and I could hear everything going on. It was kind of nice. No need to ever be lonely. But, I am indeed a loner. So now that I live in my own little studio apartment in a recently renovated apartment building quasi-owned by the University, I feel a little more comfortable. It is nice to have my own kitchen and bathroom. The windows are nice, also. I can’t complain about the faster internet connection or the proximity to campus. I get a lot more done during the day now. I would say I am indeed happier living on my own. But it was all in all a great year with some of the coolest people I know. I am definitely going to miss them.
An African Word, meaning…
I am impressed! They say ‘Ubuntu’ is an African word, meaning “Humanity to Others”. I think it means: “This OS is Awesome!!” Anyway.. My server is back up and running with Ubuntu, and I must say everything works as expected and then some. It took us a few hours of poking around and getting various config files set up, but now everything works. It has no GUI, but we installed webmin, which is seriously extremely cool. No more hunkering on the floor staring at my 9″ monochrome monitor to configure things. I can now log into the server from any client machine and use a nice easy to use, yet powerful web interface for everything. It now plays the roles of Samba server, dhcp server, router, switch, file server, WINS server and print server very well. All my clients can talk to it, and to each other, by IP address and hostname. I am very happy with the results, and will probably be putting Kubuntu on my laptop machine very soon. Thanks again, Fred!
Ubuntu Server, contd.
Step one is completed. I was actually feeling lazy about backing up some of my config files that I had running on Suse on my server, so when I decided to install Ubuntu, instead of wiping the Suse partition, I remembered that for some reason I still had my old Windows Server 2003 partition floating around on there, so I went ahead and nuked that one in favor of Ubuntu. The idea being that in case Ubuntu doesn’t immediately see my LVM groups, I can revert to Suse to back up the config files. It turns out that Ubuntu was smart enough to see them and only a simple setup was needed and they are back up with no problems. I’ll probably leave Suse on there out of sheer laziness, even though I probably won’t be using it again on that box.
So I went ahead and downloaded and installed the Ubuntu Server version, which went flawlessly and only took about 20 minutes on my 733 Mhz machine as opposed to Suse’s 1-hour install and 45 minute update routine. So far, so good. And here it is: Boot the system and I get a command line login prompt! Sweet!! Next, check what is running… Absolutely nothing. Excellent! Ubuntu Server knows it’s a server, so it doesn’t automatically start countless unneeded services. I like that. And the apt-get thing is already growing on me. It really beats adding a dozen sources to YaST’s software management module and waiting an hour for them all to refresh before I can start browsing for (sometimes outdated) packages. apt-get actually works how I would want it to. And since my residence is on the University’s campus network, apt-get is configurable to look at the mirror on the University’s Open Source Lab servers. So I am basically downloading packages from a local repository at very high speeds. Awesome! Well, that’s about as far as I got tonight, since I had to take care of some other stuff. Fred will be back over tomorrow to help me get everything up and running. But judging by the painless and seamless initial setup, I think I will be happy with this OS. Soon, I think, I will give Kubuntu a shot on my laptop, if I can figure out how to boot over the network to get the installer going. The CD drive in my laptop has pretty much given up on me. But that will be a future project. Maybe next week, if the server setup goes as planned.
