I have been dabbling with Ubuntu for the past 2 years. I remember downloading Warty Beta one day. I had been reading about the new kid on the block Ubuntu and on a boring Saturday afternoon in Buffalo I downloaded the ISO and installed it on my laptop. I kind of liked it very much almost immediately. Till date, I cannot explain what is it that I like Ubuntu. Probably it was because my previous brushes with Linux wasn't so successful. I had both Red Hat (now Fedora) and Mandrake (now Mandriva) on my machine for a long time but I never felt attracted to it.
I couldn't configure my wireless card immediately since I had a TI chipset. I had to go through the painful process of downloading some script. But it was quite easy to do since the instructions were well written. Then I went to #ubuntu to seek further help in setting up the system w.r.t audio support, etc. Well, there were probably 50 or so people in that room and they were very very helpful. This could probably be one reason why I like Ubuntu. I setup my machine in no time and was using it for development and also to connect to work. At that time I was using LAMP at work, so using Linux made it much easier. Especially the idea of workspaces.
I didn't use Windows for a long time even though I was dual-booting. I moved to the Bay Area after I got a job here and it involves development on Windows, so I had to revert back to Windows. I'm trying to convince my company to allow VPN connections from Linux machines.
I'm once again flirting with Ubuntu after the release of Dapper. I just installed a LAMP server on an old machine that I had bought for 30 bucks on Craigslist. It's a P-II 300 and has 192 Megs of RAM on it. Amazingly I didn't have to press Enter more than thrice for the entire Install process. It was all configured for me after I came back. I'm yet to play around with it much since I haven't had time. But I learnt something today.
I hadn't connected the Ethernet cable while installing the server. Since I hadn't installed the GUI, I couldn't rely on network-admin to help me out. I started out by looking for the command-line program to use. I was told that it was 'ifconfig' on #ubuntu. ifconfig didn't work first up since my ethernet cable wasn't properly connected. 
. I then set it up with a static IP address using the following command.
ifconfig eth0 192.168.0.10 netmask 255.255.255.0
This enabled me to ping my gateway and other machines on my network but not the outside world. I was told that the problem could be that it was not set to use DHCP. I was asked to use 'dhclient' to get an IP dynamically from the router. On running dhclient, everything was automatically setup and I was assigned a default IP of 192.168.0.6. Well, I was now able to connect to the Internet. I have been having a problem with DNS on my router and this requires me to change the DNS on the workstations. I learnt how to do that today. /etc/resolv.conf contains the DNS settings and I simply had to change this. I immediately setup a ssh server by doing 'sudo apt-get install openssh-server'.
I have been installing other stuff on it hence. I connect it to using ssh from my laptop. My next goal is to setup Samba from the command-line and transfer music from my other desktop to that machine.
Signing off for now,
Sripathi
