Tim Robinson

I wanted to avoid both the "hello world" first post, and generally blogging about blogging. However, I was moderately impressed about how easy this was to set up, seeing as I'm hosting this site on my own PC:

• Virtual server (Microsoft Virtual Server), since I didn't want to have connections coming directly onto the PC that has all my important files
• A pretty minimal server installation of Ubuntu 8.10
• A couple of Apache virtual hosts
• Movable Type

Ubuntu was surprisingly easy to set up: my last successful Linux experience was probably Slackware in 1999 or so. I haven't needed to try the desktop side of things yet, but Ubuntu has a level of polish similar to OS X.

One snag in the installation was that the Ubuntu console appeared corrupted under MSVS's web-based remote control, so that I could only see the first few lines. I didn't feel like digging too far into the frame buffer configuration, so I set up ssh and did the rest of the installation remotely from OS X's Terminal.

Active Directory integration was equally easy: installing Likewise Open allowed me to start logging onto my new virtual Linux server using my Windows user name and password. (I have the same setup on the Mac: the same user name and password logs into email, file shares, and OS X itself.)

The Apache and Movable Type installation came courtesy of a Google search on "ubuntu movable type" and went through without a hitch. In the past I've have run things like this on Windows through Cygwin, and have spent most of the time hacking mount points and \ vs. /. Deploying on Linux is clearly what I was supposed to be doing.