My PHP , Wordpress and Linux Lab

I have always been a fan of the Linux community and always wanted to make Linux as my main Desktop OS , but things like Visual Studio .NET stopped that from happening. For 3 years I have been administrating Linux based servers as part of my job responsibility of being a Senior Web Developer, who doesnt really like to be dependent on sys admins , who take their time to even carry out simplest of operations. I always liked the stability and robustness of these servers and always wanted to have something similar on my desktop. ‘Boot and Forget’ has been something of a dream with Microsoft Windows. But on the other hand I was so used to the Windows desktop that i was afraid to move an inch , as I thought it would effect my performance. Here is the story of how I finally had the courage to make the leap.

Last week our office network suffered a heavy blow cause of a silly virus/worm which kept on replicating itself to all computers on the network , though my system remained safe as I was using McAfee (which i consider the best anti-virus around) . One of my responsibilities includes network administration as well thus i was running between systems trying to fix one thing after the other. Some systems were damaged to the extent of needing a new XP install. That day I decided that it was time that we all moved to a less vulnerable system. The ground work was done , as we recently started to use OpenSuse 10.2 for our local testing server needs.

So next day we first tested out Ubuntu 7 aka Feisty Fawn on a junior developers machine . It was pretty much plug and play and I love the live CD idea , Wireless networking went in pretty smoothly and so did all the other hardware. Perfect! BUT I just couldnt get used to the idea of a fake root … I mean root is root…. how can you fake it? . Does the logged in user have root rights or not …. well turns out the user does have root rights but to do anything really useful you have to use ’sudo’ . Nahhhh not for me .. I want control , I dont want to fake it!!! . See Ubuntu is for the really casual desktop user, like my wife , who just needs the check her emails and browse around a bit but for people who use the computer to its full extent Ubuntu is kinda limited.

Then I installed Fedora Core 7 on an another machine and things started to fall in place. Fedora seemed to have all the answers I needed , and it also seemed to have better performance than Ubuntu. This gave me the courage and confidence to install on my own machine. So I installed FC 7 on a new hard drive on my own machine , keeping all the windows stuff on 2 seperate hard drives. The install process also proved seamless support for my SATA drive and RAID controller which while installing Windows required a driver to be installed via a floppy drive!! . As most would know Linux offers two popular desktop environments KDE and GNOME , I installed both , just to make sure I can experiment with both and find out which is best for me. After a few quick minutes on both KDE and GNOME , I decided to stick with KDE. The collection of applications provided in the install package is amazingly good , basically almost everything you might need is already in there. Ranging from Multimedia software to Server Administration tools.

All of my hardware installed automatically , including my Creative Audigy Sound Card , which I thought might be left out. The only thing that FC 7 didnt pick up was my Wifi card . So the next step was to configure the Internet/LAN connectivity via my D-Link WIFI card , the driver for which i found at http://rt2×00.serialmonkey.com/ . To see the link activity in taskbar like we do in windows system tray (the two monitors blinking on and off) , I installed KNemo. and added it to my system tray panel. See now its about customizing your environment as close to what you are already used to , basically the Windows interface. and trust me there is no real limit to customization when you enter the linux world. It is only limited by your imagination.

2 Very important sites to remember for KDE are kde-look.org and kde-apps.org . Browsing about I found a Set of XP icons which took care of the Icons part of the look and feel. Then I turned my attention towards the square “K” menu button ,I installed KBFX which allowed me to customize my “Start” button and make it rectangular or customize the icon , this app also allowed me to change the menu style and allowed templating of the K menu.

Once the look and feel become something to which I was accustomed , Now I wanted to mount my other 2 hard drives and make my XP bootable as well from my Linux GRUB loader. So I searched around and found the answer for Duel botting , I edited to my /boot/grub/grub.conf and added this to the end.

title Windows XP
map (hd0) (hd1)
map (hd1) (hd0)
rootnoverify (hd1,0)
chainloader +1

to make my NTFS partitions on my other 2 hard drives mounted at boot time , i created folders in /mnt folder and added the below to my /etc/fstab file

/dev/sdc1               /mnt/C-Drive             ntfs-3g  defaults      0 0
/dev/sdc5               /mnt/D-Drive             ntfs-3g  defaults      0 0
/dev/sdc6               /mnt/E-Drive             ntfs-3g  defaults      0 0

You can find the /dev/xyz by typing fdisk -l at the terminal, this outputs the details of the hard drives and partitions. Upon next reboot , I was able to get to my XP boot loader via the GRUB menu and also I got the other partitions mounted just fine.

Once this was out of the way I wanted to have something similar to “My Computer” , I once again found kde-apps to be my friend and found KIO Slave sysinfo:/ , i added a new link to URL on my desktop , named it My Computer and in the path to run I placed “sysinfo:/” , double clicking the icon brought me to a page which showed me my HD Partitions , CPU , RAM , VGA stats . pretty neat stuff!

Once my environment was set i moved towards my IM needs , I found Pidgin (formerly known as gaim) pretty good , with messege archiving support and ability to connect to several IM networks at the same time , it made my day. I also found KMess to be a reasonable MSN clone. Got my skype working pretty soon as well.

Wonderful , so far so good!!

Now I moved towards the tools i needed for my professional needs. As a hard core web developer , my favorite browser remains FireFox BUT i do have to check my sites with IE as well , just to make sure everything is working well for both sides of the internet world. The best news came when I found IE for linux!!!! YES IE FOR LINUX!!! Check it out here , the install went perfect and now my linux was IE capable! .Another thing I must point out here is the fact that i copied my FireFox profile over from my XP install and replaced the profile folder on my linux box and on FireFox restart , everything was there including all the plugins! WOW … Kudus to the FireFox team!

The next stage was to get my favorite WYSIWYG editor Macromedia Dreamweaver working , i had heard that it was possible . So I searched around and found how to run Macromedia Dreamweaver and Flash on Linux , wonderful resource , priceless!. Although that article is targeted at Ubuntu users but it fits perfectly fine into our Fedora distro as well. So after a bit my linux box was running Macromedia Dreamweaver as well. Though I still have to figure out how to associate PHP files with Dreamweaver , so that they would open in Dreamweaver automatically.

I tried the same approach with my favorite FTP client CuteFTP and it worked out pretty good as well , a little buggy but tolerable for me!

At the end of all this , I was pretty satisfied with how my Fedora box turned out. Now I turned towards some performance tweaks and found this really good series of articles. Part 1 , Part 2 and Part 3 , these articles surely helped me tweak a few things performance wise. The last but not the least was to go into services manager (just like I did on windows) and turn off un-needed services at run time. Like i didnt need the ISDN support , so I turned it off , I also didnt need bluetooth support , so i turned that service off , basically this will vary according to your needs , so turn off services carefully and wisely.

I think this is enough for now , in the next article I will try to cover SAMBA and how I got my network computers (which include both Windows and Linux machines) to share files and printers with each other.

Hope this info comes in handy for someone!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 12th, 2007 at 9:42 pm and is filed under Fedora, KDE, Linux. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.