Taking The Plunge (Geek Version)

So I partitioned my drive
Downloaded Fedora Core 3…

So I partitioned my drive Downloaded Fedora Core 3… Burned the DVD And I am now installing Linux on my home machine.

After I get it installed, I play to play a lot. Set up an LDAP server. Install SAMBA and see if I can be a Domain Controller. Install Mambo and make a cool portal site. Learn Apache & PHP. MySql as well. Make my opensource funk match my Windows funk.

Any tips or hints? I am a certified computer geek, so you don’t need to worry too much 🙂

More importantly, any cool programs or apps out there I should know about?

My $.02 (minus the licensing and CALs) Weed

EDIT by matthew: Adjusted teaser length.

One thought on “Taking The Plunge (Geek Version)”

  1. Hints and tips…

    Well, here are some of my favorite open-source applications. I’ll add more as time goes by:

    • Drupal. It’s the weblogging system I use here at barnson.org, and I’ve grown to love it more with time. It’s very well-designed, and becomes cleaner with each release.
    • VI Improved. You’ll find that on UNIX systems, you can guarantee you’ll have an editor named “vi”. Well, VIM improves on the old vi, turning it into a powerhouse of an editor, with syntax highlighting, class folding, spell-checking, macros… you name it, it has it. If you want to take the time to learn vi, you may as well start using vim and get an amazingly functional programmer’s editor along with your knowledge. Of course, nano, pico, joe, and ed do the job just fine, too, and I think they are all installed by default on Fedora.
    • offlineimap. This nifty Python command-line utility will synchronize a remote IMAP mail server to a local Maildir, or vice-versa. Or even synchronize two IMAP servers. It’s quite cool, I use it all the time in conjunction with…
    • Mutt. The world’s best command-line mailreader. I prefer it over Thunderbird, Outlook, and everything else I’ve tried. As with many other things, it takes a little configuration to make it perfect, but the nice thing is that, after months of tweaking, it’s perfect for me, and works the way I want to work instead of the way someone else thinks I should work. I can jam through hundreds of emails in a day due to that little mailreader. It took some time to learn, but since then has been a really big time-saver.
    • Unxutils. So you can’t get enough of the command-line goodness that is UNIX? Try these UNIX utilities. They are native Microsoft Windows ports of common GNU utilities to allow you access to thinks like bash, grep, awk, sed, find, and more.
    • Postfix. Exim’s good. Sendmail’s fine. Postfix is the shiznit, and rocks my world. My favorite Mail Transfer Agent, particularly in conjunction with…
    • Cyrus Mail. This is mail-handling overkill in one neat package. If you want to do it with IMAP, POP-3, or whatever, this Mail Delivery Agent will do it for you. However, after using Cyrus for the last six years, I may have found a strong competitor in…
    • Dovecot. Also an IMAP and POP3 server and Mail Delivery Agent, this seems to be a less-monolithic design, takes a lot less memory, and does pretty much everything I want it to do. Very nice; I’ve used it on the last few web servers I’ve rolled out, and found it totally satisfactory for all but the highest-end needs in an IMAP/POP3 server.
    • Bugzilla. What software development project would be complete without a good bug-tracker? I have to toot my own horn here; up until 2 years ago, I was heavily involved in this project. I think it’s pretty cool, but I think that some other projects are finally overtaking it, particularly those that leverage a CMS infrastructure, such as…
    • Plone. Kind of a competitor to Drupal, this Content Management System is very feature-complete for a large business with painfully large requirements.
    • Squirrelmail. You have these nifty IMAP servers, why not give them a cool web-based GUI front-end?
    • Dia. What self-respecting sysadmin doesn’t create diagrams of his network topology and infrastructure? This gives you all the tools you need to do so. Which leads one to wanting to monitor long-term performance of a network, resulting in…
    • RRDTool. This library allows you to graph out network uptimes and monitor machine states over a long-term; it’s used as the basis for a bunch of different monitoring projects. Of course, my favorite way to monitor my computer is…
    • SuperKaramba! If you use KDE (the K Desktop Environment), SuperKaramba gives you nifty little screen widgets to monitor CPU usage, your GMail, etc. and do it all with transparent, cool-looking applets that look like part of your background image if you didn’t know better.

    There are tons more. If you told me what it is you want to do with this nifty new Linux box, I could probably point you at more tools I use and love.

    —
    Matthew P. Barnson

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