[Sheflug] Building the new Linux Box

[Tom Burke <tom_burke@xxxxxxx>]

List members may remember that a week or so ago I posted a query  
asking for advice on here to start with building a Linux box of my  
own, and I received a number of replies. I later said that I was going  
to buy a 'barebones' PC and install Linux on that. This email is a  
report on how it has gone. You might or might not be interested...

The barebones machine arrived Friday afternoon. It had a motherboard,  
320 Gbyte HD, 2Gb ram, and an optical drive. I also downloaded two  
versions of Ubuntu onto CD via my Windows XP laptop: 8.04 server, and  
8.04 desktop.

I first tried installing the server. This seemed to install  
successfully, but the best screen resolution I could achieve was 640 x  
480, possibly less - I'm not sure it was 80 characters wide. I started  
again by installing the desktop version, reasoning that trying to sort  
out screen resolution issues might be easier with graphical tools. The  
problem was that the motherboard had built-in nVidia GeForce graphics  
capabilities, based around GeForce 7, which were not supported  
following a default installation. It took me a long time (several  
hours?) of research before I identified the correct graphics chip in  
the motherboard and how to install support for it in Ubuntu. Even with  
the driver enabled, however, I was left with very low resolution -  
800x600 at best. More research identified that xorg.conf needed  
changing to give me the correct screen resolutions. I first tried  
running 'dpkg-configure xserver-xorg' (several times) but this never  
seemed to ask me about screen issues, only about keyboards. Finally I  
had a go at manually editing xorg.conf. I must have made a mess of  
this because on reboot the machine dropped into text mode and (at  
last!) ran through a series of monitor and resolution questions. After  
entering the correct values and re-enabling the nVidia drivers, I  
finally got my 1280x1024 display.

I have to confess, at that point I was a bit depressed - about 3 hours  
just to get a display working didn't bode well for getting server apps  
set up. In fact, however, that was the only glitch. Today I've  
successfully installed & configured Java, MySQL and Tomcat, with  
preferred versions (pretty much) of all of these. With ssh enabled it  
means that the machine is now running headless, and I'm  connecting to  
it via a ssh client on the Windows desktop. In most cases I used the  
GUI tool Synaptic Package Manager to get the packages, and this worked  
very easily. (Installing, indeed just getting packages is an area  
where I've encountered problems that were enough to derail me  
completely on previous attempts with Linux.) But I now have the  
machine configured to a point that I'm pretty happy with.

There are just two areas that I might want to explore further. I'm not  
sure about the version of MySQL that I've installed: accessing the  
mysql command line tells me that it's version "5.0.51a-3ubuntu5.1  
(Ubuntu)", and I'm not sure how that maps onto versions distributed by  
MySQL themselves. How do I uninstall an installed package, e.g this  
tailored version of MySQL? - preferably from the command line? Finally  
I'd like to know how (from a ssh command line) I can stop the whole of  
the X environment from running at startup time? Preferably in a way  
that would be easy to re-enable if I wanted to....

Many thanks to those who helped earlier, and apologies f these  
ramblings are simply too lengthy.

Tom Burke

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