
Wordpress
So, I decided that I would move my blog from iWeb to WordPress. One of the reasons I decided to do this is it will give me the capability of hosting more blogs and even doing content based blogging. I also was dumping my iWeb folder onto my Ubuntu box and therefore didn’t have the ability to allow comments on my blog. I will still keep my personal Web site based on iWeb (at least for now), and will work on integrating them together if at all possible.
I installed WordPress on my Ubuntu Hardy (8.04 LTS) installation. I initially used the package from the ubuntu repositories (apt-get) but after my initial spin, I decided to go with the most recent tarball from WordPress itself. Installation was a breeze and consisted of:
- unpacking the tarball (tar -xvf filename)
- changing the ownership of the wordpress directory to allow the Apache user write privileges (chown -R user:group wordpress)
- creating a wordpress user and database in phpMyAdmin
- browsing to the wordpress directory
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Sid Boswell Blog, Linux Apple, Linux, Ubuntu, Wordpress

Parent's pond in Brunswick
So, I haven’t blogged in a long time. Since the family vacation in Maine I got a job, but that’s probably not the only or even the main reason. I just haven’t thought about it much and never made the time. I’m doing it now as I’m setting up a new server to replace my old Pentium HT that I bought in 2001.
Elvis has been up and running for almost a year and a half and I started thinking about all the energy it has been burning just sitting there responding to the occasional HTTP request. I also happened to have the need for a laptop on a temporary basis so I figured the two would dovetail nicely.
The laptop is a Dell Inspiron D410 subnotebook (Blackcow) that I bought used for a few hundred duckets. It’s more than capable of hosting this site as well as about a half dozen other sites that Elvis has been hosting. Some do get quite a few visits, but not enough to tax the Apache2 webserver nor the MySQL database on which most of the sites (this one not included as it’s an output of Mac OS X iWeb) use.
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Sid Boswell Blog, Life, Linux BoswellWiki, Linux, Ubuntu

Ubuntu Screenshot
I have to admit that the upgrade procedure in Ubuntu is yet another tick in the positive column in regards to the distribution. My install isn’t even a standard install and using the upgrade tool to upgrade from 6.10 (Edgy Eft) to 7.04 (Feisty Fawn) was a breeze.
I’m not sure why Ubuntu chooses to use these strange monikers to refer to releases, as most other linux distributions still use release version numbers. Even Apple still uses (mostly) version numbers (10.4.9) with the exception to the huge releases which are usually major version number changes (i.e. Panther, Tiger (10.4), Leopard (10.5?) (now delayed until June or August due to developers being pulled from OS X and put on iPhone)). I think back to the changes of naming of major releases and I can’t help starting to think about Microsoft and their changes from Windoze 3.1 and 3.11 to using years (95, 98) to using names (me, XP, and of course Vista (and all it’s various flavors). Likewise, we somewhere seem to have lost the use of version numbers in most Microsoft products (Office used to have version numbers, then years (2003), then names (XP (can’t remember which one came first … the banana or the egg)), and I now they are just moving to marketing terms (to try to keep Google and other “software as a service” models from gaining (more) market share) like Office Live (ROFLMAO) and yet they are back to (or continuing to) use years (Office 2007).
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Sid Boswell Blog, Linux Linux, Ubuntu, Vista, Windoze

Ubuntu
Now that I’m just about fully converted off of my old PC, I’ve decided to have some fun with it. Some folks wonder how I can consider this fun, but to each his own.
I’ve decided to try to live without Windoze. I’m sure that I”ll have to run it for some things (Stacie really likes the buttons on the front of the scanner that make “copies”), but most of those things can be done in a virtual machine. I won’t delete my XP partitions just yet, but will attempt to use native XP (as opposed to XP in a VM) as little as possible.
I started with downloading some of the live CDs/DVDs for some Linux distributions to figure out which ones I like. I tried Mandriva, Ubuntu, Kubuntu, CentOS, and openSUSE. I really liked KDE in Kubuntu, but am more comfortable with GNOME and it seems more stable and a bit faster. I narrowed my search down to CentOS, SUSE, and Ubuntu.
Next, I decided to actually install the distributions that I liked and take a whorl at configuring them and getting things set up like I like them (LAMP + Parallels + a few other odds and ends). Here is what I discovered…. Read more…
Sid Boswell Blog, Linux Apple, Linux, Ubuntu, Windoze