Pacific Side

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.

I am thinking of getting my pilot's license. It's something I've always wanted to do and now seems as good a time as any. The only thing holding me back is the cost. Kind of expensive here but maybe I can come up with some side gigs to cover it. Here are the two schools/airports closest to Azusa:

• Blue Diamond Aviation at Brackett Field Airport
• FAST Aviation at El Monte Airport

Recently I tried out the following free virtualization packages:

- Microsoft Virtual Server 2005
- Microsoft Virtual PC 2007
- VMware Server

with the following free Linux distributions:

- Debian
- Fedora
- Ubuntu

The Microsoft virtualization packages technically support only Microsoft operating systems, but supposedly they can run Linux too. I didn't have any success with booting a Linux installation on either product though and didn't feel like messing with it if it wasn't straightforward. VMware Server is free, straightforward, and ran all the Linux distributions I tried with no problems. It's a great product.

Once VMware Server was running, I tried installing Debian, Fedora, and Ubuntu to compare a couple Linux distributions. Debian alone isn't easy enough to use for my taste. Fedora is pretty bulky and the setup disc alone was a 2.8GB download. Ubuntu was my favorite by far. It's built on Debian and defaults to the Gnome GUI. It looks great and was easy to install and configure. Ubuntu Linux is a great free alternative to anyone wanting to avoid the cost of Microsoft Windows or Apple Mac OS X.