Feeling accomplished today
Nov. 4th, 2012 06:26 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
banjoplayinnerdI've been playing with my new computer to see what it can do. Short answer: a lot. Right now I'm running two virtual machines on it, one with Windows 7 and my favorite ham radio programs, one with XUbuntu 12.10 running some server software. That, and the native Linux apps I'm running on the main machine like chromium and thunderbird. I've even launched Portal in the wine Windows emulator a couple of times, and apart from my graphics card running hot, it runs very nicely.
The virtual Xubuntu machine is where I've been putting my efforts the last couple of days. In connection with learning Ruby and Rails I've decided I wanted to get a handle on nginx (Engine X), an alternative web server to Apache or IIS. I see it crop up more and more in job announcements, so I figured it would be worth a look. After a situation where I got two different versions of nginx running, I removed them both and started from scratch. That's when I discovered that the instructions for installing one of the components had carefully documented steps 1, 2, 3, 5 and 6, leaving out step 4 entirely. Google helped me figure that one out. Then I found that the configuration for a different component had changed in the last year, making one of the tasks I was trying to accomplish (getting a PHP information page to show) completely wrong and driving me nuts for two hours because I couldn't connect to a process that wasn't running the way they said it should be. Everything got sorted out sometime after midnight last night. Good thing I had that extra hour of sleep last night.
Today I installed a package called phpmyadmin that acts as a web interface to my database running on the virtual machine. That's one of the last pieces of the puzzle I needed before I could get Rails up and running. Oh sure, I could have done it on the command line, but the web interface is faster and makes it easier to see what's going on.
Next up, I need to decide on a project to work on to learn Rails. I have a couple in mind. Maybe I'll do them both, one after the other.
The virtual Xubuntu machine is where I've been putting my efforts the last couple of days. In connection with learning Ruby and Rails I've decided I wanted to get a handle on nginx (Engine X), an alternative web server to Apache or IIS. I see it crop up more and more in job announcements, so I figured it would be worth a look. After a situation where I got two different versions of nginx running, I removed them both and started from scratch. That's when I discovered that the instructions for installing one of the components had carefully documented steps 1, 2, 3, 5 and 6, leaving out step 4 entirely. Google helped me figure that one out. Then I found that the configuration for a different component had changed in the last year, making one of the tasks I was trying to accomplish (getting a PHP information page to show) completely wrong and driving me nuts for two hours because I couldn't connect to a process that wasn't running the way they said it should be. Everything got sorted out sometime after midnight last night. Good thing I had that extra hour of sleep last night.
Today I installed a package called phpmyadmin that acts as a web interface to my database running on the virtual machine. That's one of the last pieces of the puzzle I needed before I could get Rails up and running. Oh sure, I could have done it on the command line, but the web interface is faster and makes it easier to see what's going on.
Next up, I need to decide on a project to work on to learn Rails. I have a couple in mind. Maybe I'll do them both, one after the other.
