Long story short, my PC died. The motherboard that ran the system now sits in its original box awaiting some sort of disposal. And since “change” has been pretty popular theme lately, I decided to ditch XP Pro for Ubuntu.
My first decision was whether to get the desktop or server edition. Jed, another developer in the office recently installed Ubuntu and suggested going with the desktop install and then adding server apps (apache/mysql/php, etc) since the desktop packages where pretty large and you might as well have them on the install. I initially had problems with the Ubuntu install while trying to load the OS onto a SATA drive (don’t know why), but I found another 80G IDE drive laying around and used that and the install went without a hitch.
So, I’m up and running now. What else did I have to install? Apache, Mysql, php5, eclipse, and wine. I also had to setup my local drupal site for development. Took a little bit of time to get the groups and permissions set up correctly so I could work inside the drupal directory but nothing a google search couldn’t help with. Another app I installed was QuickSynergy . It allows me to use my keyboard and mouse on my XP laptop. Pretty sweet.
Overall, I’m really impressed and excited about having this kind of power and utility with a machine for working at home.
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I think my next little tweak will be to somehow use hamachi on my home machine and work desktop and use my home workstation as a dedicated (to me) linux server.