Without a real purpose or point to doing it, I loaded a new system onto my PC the other day. I've essentially come to the realization that I only need a text editor, and the internet (with a web browser (preferrably Firefox)), and I'm 80% happy on a computer. A decent image editing program would make me feel good too, but I can get by 80% of the time without one.
So, what on earth did I do this for? For the halibut of course. Why Ubuntu? No real clue. Somebody was nice enough at one point to give me a POS laptop for school. The thing is really crappy, and totally pointless, since it can't get on the internet. I'd say that if I don't have the internet on a computer… only 30% happy with the computer. So, with this junky laptop, I installed SuSe but it ran slower than all get out. It came on either 4 or 5 CD's and probably took 4 to 5 hours to install. The system was slow, and eventually… useless to me. So, I got Ubuntu, and gave it a shot.
They claim that with Linux (Ubuntu and SuSe are versions/kinds/flavors of Linux) that you can bring older computers back to life, and get new use out of them. SuSe wasn't happening for me on that laptop, hence Ubuntu (which works like a charm on the laptop and now also on my PC desktop).
Still unable to get on the internet, it's not all that great. It's the only one of my three computers to have a floppy disk drive. That's helpful… not. It's got some games. I can mess it up and not really care. It's a computer. Whatever.
I know nothing about Linux. I've already reinstalled 3 or 4 times (was missing a really simple step at the beginning), but only one of them was necessary for me. I'll probably reinstall it again when I mess something else up. All in all though, if I don't like it, I'll just reboot, and load Winblows the next time around. Now I just need to figure out how to turn this thing into a webserver, and we'll be talking more serious stuff…
Hm...interesting article. I used to have a dual-boot on my machine and could load either "Winblows" or Red Hat Linux. Linux is pretty cool, but less user friendly than a Mac. You should be able to download a sweet program to run PHP/MySQL/Apache. You then have to turn your router into a domain and feed the incoming port to your Apache system running on your machine.
That's if you want outside traffic. If you just need a testing server, you can use localhost on your machine. XAMPP is great for that. "I mean... I played it."
You're on the right track to becoming a talented hacker. Congratumuhlations.
I might give it a try. My mac by default has apache loaded onto it, and I put on PHP. The MySQL part is a little tougher, but still possible on the mac. If the installation doesn't take very long, then it will probably be worth my time. Overall though, it's nice to have a no-nonsense system that I can have there.