Finally some progress!

June 18th, 2008

Since my MacBook decided to die on me for the second time in 6 months, progress on nearly every project I have going has come to a halt. I’m in the process of launching a web design company (or was . . .), which leads to a HUGE list of things to get in order. Business plan, prototyping server, portfolio, registering the business as an actual company (apparently important), tax id# (more important), . . . the list goes on.

I bought a mac mini to serve as a second (backup?) workstation. My macbook won’t be back in action for another two weeks (new hard drives are expensive) and I won’t get my data from the busted drive for at least a month (gonna have to save 20,000 pennies or so for that). So the mac mini is the main production machine for now. It’s all set up, the main apps I need are all in place (Dreamweaver, Photoshop, Flash, TextWrangler, Fetch).

With that done, I’m back to where I started, time to knock out the next to-do: development server. I installed Ubuntu Server Edition 8.04 on an old Dell that was gifted to me by good friend Carlos (though I haven’t heard from him in weeks, did he go back to Mexico?). Running at 2.4 ghz P4 with a mere 256mb of RAM (also gifted from Carlos I think), the server is running great. There is a decent learning curve when it comes to setting up a LAMP server (Linux Apache Mail Php), but nothing ubuntuforums.org couldn’t help me with.

I’m using webmin to administrate the machine. E-box is gaining popularity, and is the only solution listed in the ubuntu docs (they even took webmin out of the repository), but I’ve used webmin before so I used that. I’ll try e-box on a virtual machine so I can compare and see which one I like better.

More to come . . .

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