Jul

5

Installing a Web Server on Your Old Laptop

July 5, 2009 | By: UbuntuLinuxHelp | 1 Comment
Posted in Linux Projects - Hands On

                                                              

This entry is part 5 of 5 in the series Building a Web Developer / Designer PC

In an earlier post to this series, I talked about converting an old ancient IBM Thinkpad T22 Laptop into a proxy server (using Squid). While this did substantially improve my web surfing speed, it occurred to me that the laptop could be put to more use. One example is to install MediaWiki on it (to replace the Tomboy Notes application I use). In reality, I was surprised at the performance given the lack of hardware resources on this laptop, as such, I knew it could be put to more use.

One thing you'll notice in this post is that the command line does not use "sudo". This is because the last post configured the server to permit root logins via SSH. In fact, there is a lot of information in the last post that directly relates to (or effects) what we'll do in this one, again, please read it: Faster Internet With an Old Laptop – Ubuntu and Squid. Otherwise some of us might get a bit lost trying to complete the hands-on activities in this post. Also a reminder that this is an Ubuntu server 8.04 LTS, if using other versions of Ubuntu (or other Debian based distributions, you'll probably need to make a few adjustments).

In order to make this old laptop even more useful, in addition to the previously installed Squid proxy server, we're going to add an Apache webserver with PHP, MySQL database server and Mail server (SMTP/POP3). The mailserver is just for the future in the event it's needed or any PHP based package requires it (so you can skip that if you don't need it). More importantly, Apache and MySQL are needed so I can successfully install and use MediaWiki.

First SSH into your server. The command for me is:

ssh root@squid.localdomain (You'll need to substitute the hostname you chose for your server).

Let's get some packages for  compiling, zip, perl, ssl, certificates and so on. Remember, because you logged in as root, you don't have to Read more

Jun

29

Installing Compass on Ubuntu

June 29, 2009 | By: UbuntuLinuxHelp | 2 Comments
Posted in How to...

                                                              

This entry is part 3 of 5 in the series Building a Web Developer / Designer PC

One thing I particularly enjoy are tools that make my work simpler. I was reading a post on Smashing Magazine about "35 CSS-Lifesavers For Efficient Web Design" that mentioned Compass. It's a a real stylesheet framework. As such it's of great benefit to web developers and designers who have some coding skills.

What particularly attracted me to Compass were four issues:

  1. Simplifies maintainable, semantic CSS that I can import into any project.
  2. Compiles my CSS files as beautiful code!
  3. Community support.
  4. Excellent support from the developer, Chris Eppstein, who was VERY generous with his time, patience and assistance while trying to troubleshoot a few things in our multi email session over the greater part of a Sunday afternoon (I'm sure he had better things to do, but I really appreciated his help in getting me going - Thats a great example of outstanding developer and community support - WOW!.

If you've not heard about Compass yet, Read more

Jun

2

Faster Internet With an Old Laptop – Ubuntu and Squid

June 2, 2009 | By: UbuntuLinuxHelp | 8 Comments
Posted in Linux Projects - Hands On

                                                              

This entry is part 4 of 5 in the series Building a Web Developer / Designer PC

I've posted more than once about tips we can complete to improve our web surfing. This morning I was cleaning out some old hardware (to take to the recycling centre) when I happened upon one of the last old laptops I had.

It's an older IBM Thinkpad T22, Type 2647 with 256MB of RAM and a 20GB hard drive. A couple years ago, I had 2o of these units, bought from a recycling depot. I sold them all on eBay, and only have a couple left now.

IBM Thinkpad T22

Whilst packing up the stuff to cart off, it occurred to me that I could put this old laptop to work by installing a proxy / caching server on it, and have my we browsers, pull much of the regularly requested web content off a locally cached network server. This means installing Squid. Not sure what Squid is: Squid (software), from their site:

"...Squid is a proxy server and web cache daemon. It has a wide variety of uses, from speeding up a web server by caching repeated requests, to caching web, DNS and other computer network lookups for a group of people sharing network resources, to aiding security by filtering traffic. Although primarily used for HTTP and FTP, Squid includes limited support for several other protocols including TLS, SSL, Internet Gopher and HTTPS. The development version of Squid (3.1) includes IPv6 and ICAP support..."

Needless, as I currently enjoy using Ubuntu, that's what I used as the OS for this project. Installing a Squid server on the network, provided me with a few important benefits:

  • Less bandwidth usage.
  • Faster web surfing.
  • Network cached copies of pages I regularly visit (if the original server is down).

Firstly, make sure you've Read more

Mar

24

Building a Web Developer / Designer PC Using Ubuntu Linux – Revisited

March 24, 2009 | By: UbuntuLinuxHelp | 5 Comments
Posted in Applications, How to..., Linux Projects - Hands On

                                                              

This entry is part 2 of 5 in the series Building a Web Developer / Designer PC

Recently I posted "Build a Web Developer PC and Enable Most Media Playback Using Ubuntu Linux" and received a few messages asking what other tools I use. To save me time with answering email messages that essentially contain the same information, and to help the maximum number of readers, I thought it would be a good follow up to that earlier post.

First off, there some other applications I use, namely:

xVidCap. This facilitates screen capturing video so that I can create tutorial videos. After which ffmpeg can be used to convert the captured video to flv format for web streaming.  If you're interested, they have a couple instructional videos: Video 1 and Video 2. To install it, the command is:

sudo aptitude install xvidcap

Also, to be able to quickly find the differences between Read more

Mar

16

Build a Web Developer PC and Enable Most Media Playback Using Ubuntu Linux

March 16, 2009 | By: UbuntuLinuxHelp | 11 Comments
Posted in Applications, How to..., Linux Projects - Hands On

                                                              

This entry is part 1 of 5 in the series Building a Web Developer / Designer PC

For those of you who follow my other blog, you'll know that my last Windows PC had a major failure again. You can read some of the specifics in the "When Disaster Strikes - Again" post. At that point I decided to install Ubuntu (effectively removing Windows based PC's from the network).

In some ways I was bothered about this. Why? I work best with Illustrator, Photoshop, After Effects, Dreamweaver, WinSCP, Flash and so on. I felt like I was going to lose all the productivity these applications provided. I enjoy being able to double click media and play it automatically, same goes with DVD movies, etc. In Linux, I've often encountered problems with media playback as the media usually includes restricted formats, MP3 for example. On the developer/designer side, I was not looking forward (nor do I have time) to a steep learning curve.

This post (hopefully) will show the desktop user how to enable all the restricted media playbacks (movie DVD, music MP3, etc.)

It will also show web developers and designers some of the issues, applications and work arounds - Or at least the current state of them.

First off, let's deal with the media issues. I built this PC using Ubuntu 8.04 LTS 64Bit (Hardy). I did Read more


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