25 July 2007
Ubuntu Linux - Part 2
Have had some time to use Ubuntu now and still really like it. It includes the OpenOffice.org suite and Gedit, which makes a good lightweight IDE (I prefer lightweight editors to heavy IDEs). Before I could ever think about switching to Ubuntu for good though, I needed to be able to add three items to the default installation:
(1) Chinese language input
(2) Sharing network resources with other PCs running Microsoft Windows
(3) Apache web server with PHP and MySQL
Ubuntu is built on Debian, and Debian makes it easy to add packages. Here is a list of packages I installed (along with their dependencies):
- scim
- samba
- winbind
- apache2
- mysql-server
- mysql-query-browser
- mysql-admin
- php5
- php5-mysql
- phpmyadmin
The following resources also came in handy:
- https://help.ubuntu.com/community/SCIM
- https://help.ubuntu.com/community/SettingUpSamba
- https://help.ubuntu.com/community/ApacheMySQLPHP
(1) SCIM is the multiple language input tool for Ubuntu. I was able to install the package, add the necessary Chinese input methods, and then follow some steps in the documentation above to make SCIM the default input method for all applications.
(2) Installed Samba to allow for resource sharing between Ubuntu and peers running Microsoft Windows. This required some use of the console to add Samba users. Also installed Winbind so that I can ping Windows machines by hostname from Ubuntu and vice versa.
(3) Installed the regular packages for Apache 2, PHP 5, and MySQL 5 along with the PHP-MySQL connector and the MySQL Administrator and Query Browser GUI tools and phpMyAdmin for managing MySQL. The only real change I had to make after installation was to set the root password for MySQL according to the steps in the documentation.