Well now, I finally did it. Of course, to get this little blog of mine up and running took a little bit of experimentation, two crashed OS’s, some studying on the pro’s and con’s of Apache 1.3 vs. Apache 2.0, and a lot of yelling at the computer and whichever of my friends that happened to be closest. Not to mention the poor folks that man the call center for Comcast. (Which, in my not so humble opinion, Comcast should fund better in the arena of education and training rather than pouring their capital into marketing and lobbying on the Hill.) Why all of this ruckus over posting a simple little blog? In a word- Confusion.
It all started with my installation of Mepis 6.0. I had been a Suse user for years, and loved the OS, but when I upgraded to 10.1, the proverbial fecal material hit the high frequency oscillating target. First the burns for the OS images went poorly. For some reason, CD’s 1,4,5 and the Add-On CD went well, but for some reason K3B refused to burn the images for CD’s 2 and 3. At first, I thought this was an issue with the CD-Burner that I was using at the time. However, after consulting with the person who got me started on Suse Linux 9.1, it seemed that there was a problem with K3B itself. (For those of you who do not use Linux or Open Source Software, K3B is a burning utility like Nero, except most of the time it has more features and is definetly more user friendly than the burning utilities in the MS world.) This was confirmed after I switched out the CD-Burner for another, and the same issue was happening. I finally got the CD’s burned, don’t ask me how, and then went for the install. I backed up my data, did the install, and I was in! That’s when the problems started.
You see, I didn’t read the documents or the forums on Suse before I went ahead with the install. All I did for “research” was to read the glowing reviews that were posted all over the web when it was released. However, these reviews just went into how easy the installation was, how great the User Interface was, and then explained a little bit about the utility that made Suse famous: YaST. (Yet Another Set-Up Tool.) If I would have read the forums that were dedicated to Suse and OpenSuse, I would have found out that there were a lot of bugs, glitches, and down right ill-thought out design in this version of Suse. Yast wouldn’t work properly, YOU (the Yast On-Line Updater) was broken, and several hardware configurations were mis-configured. However, it did get installed, and I did get to experiment with the 3-D Desktop. The disappointing thing about the 3-D desktop was that it was not simple to implement or configure, which was yet another thing that all the glowing reviews forgot to tell their readership about. You had to install components from the CD’s, modify config files, and generally jump through hoops to get it operating in the KDE envirnonment. (I prefer KDE because it was the first Desktop Environment that I experienced on Linux. I’ve never ran Gnome, and played around with FluxBox, IceWM, and XFCE, but always felt more comfortable in KDE.) But Wait! If you read the press releases and the reviews, you would assume that getting the 3-D desktop was simple! Well, it wasn’t; at least on the KDE side of things.
At this point, my friend was tired of fighting with Suse. He tried to migrate to 10.1 from 9.3, and all of his environmental settings and hardware configurations were completely messed up. The problem with his experience, though, was that he was installing it on his laptop (a Sony Vaio) which was his production environment for work. (He works as a Web Developer for a big health care insurance company that relies on its internal web applications for day to day business critical needs.) He could not go about and muck around with the configuration of Suse. He needed his laptop, and he needed it NOW! So, one Saturday afternoon, he gives me a call and tells me to start some research on other OS’s.
That Saturday, I downloaded four different “flavors” of Linux. Out came the CD’s, and onto them I applied Kubuntu 6.06 “Dapper Drake”, Mepis 6.0, PCLinuxOS, and the latest from Knoppix. I tried them all before installing. I knew more than enough about the Debian architectural underpinnings of the Ubuntu flavors, had heard nothing but good things about PCLinuxOS, and had used Knoppix regularly when diagnosing my own computer when I goofed up or when removing spyware from other’s computers. He, however, decided to go with the DVD ISO of Kubuntu. Like I stated before, I like KDE. So does he, which is the reason for all these distributions being KDE-centric. Needless to say, he liked the apt-get utility in the Debian sphere of influence. So did I, after dealing with “dependency hell” for two years on the Suse platform. (Even the SMART Package Manager, Guru’s repo, and other repositories couldn’t save you from that in the RPM universe.) Onto his laptop went Kubuntu! I was more hesitant, though, as I was used to Yast. Yast is a great utility for configuring all kinds of things in the Linux world without having to drop down to the command line to edit a text file. Think of it as a more secure version of Microsoft’s Control Panel in Windows. However, the problem with Yast is that it relies on a whole host of scripts for it to boot and run, which makes it powerful, but very slow. In the past year, I was already doing the majority of the installations of RPM’s and configurations of Networking and Graphics on the command line anyway, because it was just faster to do it that way than to wait for Yast to boot up. Once my friend pointed that out to me, I finally decided on Mepis 6.0.
With that decision, I’ve been very happy! The computer was already set up with everything that would have taken me another two hours to configure on Suse right out of the box. (Or ISO, as is this case.) The only thing I had to do was to activate the Audio and Video Codecs! (Those are the files on your computer that tell your computer how to display all those wonderful movie and song files.) Once that was done, the whole environment was perfect! All my programming files were there, and the only thing extra that I had to do was to install the source code for the kernel from one of the repositories. (I like to compile a lot of the programs from source to make sure the config files catch all the variables in my particular environment. Not to mention that I think most of the time, when you compile from source, the program just works faster. Of course, that’s probably just perception…)
So, what does this have to do with putting up a silly little blog? A whole lot. The reason for it is that I was amazed at how simply every thing worked in Mepis, and thought I would try my hand at other things that I was too scared to do before. Of course, here I’m referencing to actually putting up a web site. I had never considered this before, even though I know the basics of HTML and Javascript. The thing is, though, I knew enough of web coding to get through someone else’s code, and maybe put in a modification here and there, but not enough to actually write something from scratch and have it look nice and readable when someone else would browse to it. This procrastination ended with the installation of Mepis on the computer, though. From the forums at MepisLovers.com I heard about this great little utility to help people with posting their own Blogs called “WordPress”. Hurray! This sounded exactly what I was looking for!
Then the confusion set in. I installed WordPress from Synaptic. And then I looked for it. And looked for it, and then I looked for it some more. I couldn’t find it! Their were no executables, and the only thing I found from the installation log in Synaptic were a bunch of PHP and HTML files scattered all over the place. Then it hit me: WordPress was not an application in the ordinary sense. It was a web based program to generate an HTML and PHP page! Hence the reason why Apache, MySQL, and PHP had to be running on my machine at the same time for it to do what I wanted it to do. This was quite a shock to me, as everything (yet again) that I read had led me to believe that it was an application; kind of like a pared down version of Frontpage or Dreamweaver, but meant just for blogs. So, in the process of trying to get the software up on the computer, somehow I had inadvertently installed two instances of Apache. One was version 1.3, the other was version 2.0. This was in addition to the MySQL and PHP servers that were currently running on the machine.
Now, the fun happens! In the middle of trying to set this up, I had somehow disabled my firewalls. Knowing myself, I had probably become a little too click happy with some of the dialog boxes that had popped up on my screen. (Yet another “blond” moment in my life, I guess.) So, now I had two unsecured web servers running, a database that was not properly setup, and more than likely an unsecured PHP server running. This made the system come to a grinding halt, to say the least! Not knowing very much about web development, and having felt that my system was compromised, I just reinstalled Mepis. (This time, installation and configuration of everything only took about 20 minutes). I was up and running again! And still intent on making a weblog.
Which leads me to my confrontation with the”good” folks who run my Broadband service. I called them in an effort to see if they had the specifications so I could run WordPress on my personal web page site, which is what I’m paying all the monthly fees for after all, right? I mean, no one actually gets 6 megabits per second transfer rates through their cable modems in reality, right? Of course I’m right. The most that a person can hope to attain is about 500 kBPS from most servers because of the bottlenecks in the net architecture right now. (If the DSL providers would market this, they would get a lot more people switching. I don’t know why they don’t.) I call them, thinking I will talk to competent people who know a lot about web pages. I don’t know why I was surprised when I found out that they were completely clueless about why I wanted to do what I wanted to do. They didn’t even know what type of servers they were running on their network! What they wanted me to do was pay an additional US $50 per month for them to host my personal blog!
That’s when I decided to just run with the WordPress hosting site. It does everything I wanted it to do, without the hassle of setting up Apache, MySQL, and PHP on top of my current Linux distro. While I love Linux, I’m not much of a server guy. (Unfortunately, the only thing I know about servers is what I know to get a linux Printer and File server up and running securely, and Microsoft SQL Server 7.0.) Eventually I see myself hosting this weblog on its own domain, with customised HTML coding, but for now the web-based version suits me just fine. It’s not like I expect a lot of people to be reading my meandering, abstract thoughts in the first place. (Unless if I post one of my Linux tutorials and it gets promoted on Digg.com, that is.)
I think that should be enough for an initial first post. My god, but did I ramble! 🙂
The Cathedral Arctic 