Wow, what couple of days I have just had! I have been trying to get a 2nd machine up and running as a web server in my living room so that I have a totally separate development area from my desktop and what a load of fun I have had doing it.

I have had the pleasure of looking after a dedicated linux box before for a website I was responsible for but that was fairly straight forward, in the last 2 days I have have had to build the lot from scratch and then get it networked to my main pc.

One of the problems I had was the fact that the server box doesn’t have a monitor so I needed to set up some sort of remote desktop to manage it, the other problem that I had to overcome was the fact that I had never done any Linux networking before. I am glad to say that I have now overcome both with a little helping hand here and there.

I have to say it is a total refief to have it all set up now, I still have a couple of things (well one in particular) that I would like to have set up before I can can call it a done deal but as far as I am concerned it has been an interesting learning experience.

Now that I have this set up I have a shiney new Apache2 / PHP5 / MySQL dedicated box to look after all of my development sites. I may look into adding in some other stuff at a later date but for now I have some coding work to get on with, only this time in a fully Linux environment.

I’ll tell you something for nothing… Feels good to be leaving Windows behind and I have never been so excitied about the possibilities that lay ahead now that I have been baptised in Ubuntu!

Here’s to the future :D

Oh yeah, I will try and write my own version of the how to when I get a chance and list all the resources I used so that any of you out there thinking about making the leap can do so…