So, you are facing a freshly installed copy of Linux. It has the basics,
but nothing else. What do you install first?
I can answer that question because I just did it for the UML system you see
here.
Here’s what I loaded …
I have download most of my brain into Emacs macros, so working without
emacs for any length of time is not acceptable. Fortunately, a quick
‘apt-get install emacs21’ and a working emacs system becomes
available.
After loading emacs, I grabbed the .emacs file (and all of its supporting
libraries) from my desktop system.
My overall plan for this UML system is to use it as my web host. That means
that apache is required. Grabbing apache with apt-get was simple.
I plan to base my web site around a Ruby based blogging package called
Rublog. That means Ruby will be needed. Since I tend to track the latest
version of Ruby a little more closely than Debian does, I normally install
Ruby by hand from source. Fortunately, installing Ruby is trivial. I just
downloaded the source (from www.ruby-lang.org), and did the
standard configure/make/make install commands.
Next I needed the Rublog software. I had been playing with Rublog on my
laptop, so I had the configuration pretty well decided by that point. I
just copied the laptop setup to the UML system.
Finally, Rublog needs RDoc to render any RDoc postings. A quick visit to
the Ruby Application Archive to grab RDoc and I was good to go.
And that completed my first phase of setups. I had to do a little reading
on setting up iptables and a bit of configuration with apache. The result
is what you see here.