Mick's World

Here’s an amazing look at how someone ordinary can be turned into looking like a model for an advertisement.

It really puts into perspective what we see as beauty and how advertising can be very deceiving.

From my backyard i get a good view facing West and due to this there are occasionally some spectacular sunsets. There are many beautiful evenings in summer time due to the location of the sun setting.

Recently there has been a bit of rain in Brisbane, which we have greatly missed and welcome any storms that occur. A couple of days ago there was a storm building up and as the sun was setting behind Mt. Cootha it looked as if some sort of fire or explosion was behind the mountain.

Hopefully we get more storms and more great sunsets.

OMG this OS is so 1337!!!!!1

Ok cut the crap. That’s what i found Ubuntu to do. Here’s how it did just that.

But first a brief history. When i started using Linux years ago i started with a copy of Redhat. After become obsolete, a natural progression from Redhat, was to move to Fedora for Linux needs. I tried a few other flavours, but at the time wasn’t as satisfied as i was with Fedora.

After using Fedora for a while and in the end not being 100% content with how i was able to set it up for my situation i recently start reading about Ubuntu. Obviously there has been a lot of hype about Ubuntu and i thought, why not give it a try.

I took the plunge and installed the server edition. Now the server edition is different from the desktop edition for a number of reasons, but a primary reason is that it doesn’t have a graphical desktop. Since i was installing this for use as a development server i wanted the features provided by the server edition.

Once i had it installed it was a matter of customising it to my liking.

First thing i did was to get the beautiful desktop that Ubuntu provides. To do this i simply typed sudo apt-get install ubuntu-desktop. It was that easy, after a reboot i was on the Gnome desktop. That was also when i discovered how great apt-get is. Coming from yum on Fedora, apt-get was a breath of fresh air.

After that i wanted to do more this fresh install and also set it up like the beast of the dev server that i wanted it to be. To do this i followed this fantastic tutorial - The Perfect Setup - Ubuntu 6.06 LTS Server (Dapper Drake).

This allowed me to setup a server with the lot basically. It included LAMP, Email, DNS and more.

While looking around for information on Ubuntu prior to downloading it i came across an article - Hack Attack: Top 10 Ubuntu apps and tweaks. Which provides some excellent information on a few tweaks and extras that are available for Ubuntu that enhance it just that bit more.

From this list of tweaks my favourites were, Automatix, Add NTFS Read/Write support and Frozen Bubble! I consider these as must haves in particular the NTFS support as i had a hard drive with a lot of backup data that was NTFS. Also Frozen Bubble is very addictive.
After installing and customising this new flavour of Linux i was happy to play around with all the new features i’d just added. This didn’t last long as after a couple of days i wanted to customise more and with the ease of use that apt-get provided i was off sculpting away at my Linux box.

In the next edition of this series i’ll describe in more detail about further customisation i made to the system. In the mean time i suggest you follow the links in this post, download a copy of Ubuntu and try it out for yourself, if you’re not doing so already.

Continue to Part 2 »

This afternoon this site experienced some downtime, which in the case of my host, is rare. The site was down for around 2 hours, which was a pain as i was in the middle of something when the server dropped.

Not to worry as nothing was lost and everything is back to normal now.

Anyway just a quick update about that. Some more substantial reading is on its way. So stay tuned.