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I received my new server last week, and thus began my quest to try out new things, and move all my stuff from my old server.
My previous OS choice was Ubuntu, and Fedora before that. This time I’ve decided to go down the OpenSolaris route.
Once I got over the initial culture shock of the new environment, found out that the registration screen that appears on login to Gnome desktop is only for Solaris, and then abandoned the GUI altogether, I discovered that OpenSolaris is a very nicely organised and setup OS.
I just did the default full install, and probably got loads of stuff I’ll never use. Once I had bash setup as my default shell, I was off exploring the various features.
My favorite things so far are:
- ZFS Volume management has never been so easy.
- Zones/Containers A (semi-)isolated OS virtualization technique, that makes separating your environment so easy.
- BlastWave Although not actually part of Solaris, this package manager makes installing software almost as simple as apt-get in Ubuntu.
So far I’ve migrated my MySQL server to it’s own isolated Zone, and shall be moving my web servers across in the next few days.
It’s been a good week. I’ve finally taken on some work after a month or so spent learning new stuff, plus I feel motivated about doing it.
Today it became a bad week. My Macbook wouldn’t start up this morning, the only life from the hard drive being some nasty ticking sounds. Oh dear I thought. A quick tinker with Disk Utility and System Profiler led me to the conclusion that the drive was in fact dead!
I dropped it off at my local Apple service centre and waved OS X goodbye for 1-2 weeks. Just as well I do regular backups and keep my working code in version control, I had only lost about 2 hours work at the most through the failure.
So what am I going to use in the meantime? I borrowed a laptop, and quickly set about replacing it’s Windows install with linux. I decided to go to my favourite distribution of late for my server, Ubuntu. A stroke of luck here, the new version came out today; 6.10 “Edgy Eft”. So now the AMD Athlon powered HP laptop in front of me is singing along updating itself with all the latest patches.
No doubt I’ll have more to say about my experiences in later posts, but for now I am left with the dilema; What IDE or editor for Ruby on linux?
Having played around with the latest version of the popular Ubuntu distribution in the last week or so, I thought I’d give a quick guide to installing RMagick. Unlike Breezy, Dapper doesn’t seem to work to well with the RMagick Gem (Norman Timmier has some great
advice on installing RMagick under Breezy). Instead, use the following apt-get package command (It’s all one line) to get you up and running…
$ sudo apt-get install imagemagick libmagick9 librmagick-ruby-doc librmagick-ruby1.8
That should see you good. Now if you have the irb package you can test that RMagick is indeed loaded. If you don’t have irb installed, install it as so…
$ sudo apt-get install irb
Now you can test RMagick, remembering that the capitalisation is important here…
$ irb
> require 'RMagick'
=> true
> exit
Updated: If it returns true as in the above example, all is good. If you don’t get the true result, something has gone wrong with the installation, best try again it might still be ok, see Tim Hunter’s comment below to see why, thanks Tim.
I hope this guide makes the installation slightly easier for someone, it took me a while when I transitioned to Dapper, I was still used to using the gem like I do on the Mac.
Did you like my Ruby on Rails related article? Then why not recommend me on Working with Rails?
Thanks to
Jens Kraemer for sending me a copy of the ferret_ext file I was requiring to get my search working.
Maybe upgrading from Ubuntu Breezy to Dapper causes a few problems I hadn’t come across before. I’ll need to try a fresh install of Dapper, and see if compiling Ferret works on that.
I’m now running
Capistrano, a very clever set of Rake deployment scripts for rails. Being able to commit a revision to the live server, and revert to the previous version if it all goes wrong is brilliant.
After 3 days of torment attempting to get my new Rails app online, it is now up!
My server is now running Ubuntu Dapper with Lighttpd and FastGGI serving my blog. I ran into two problems getting this to work:
- First up Ferret does not install properly, and the file ferret_ext appears not to be compiled, and thus unavailable to the app. As soon as I started the server it would crash, citing the missing file. For this reason search is disabled, but will hopefully be reinstated as soon as I have solved my problems with this.
- The RMagick Gem wouldn’t work, and was again cited as missing by the server. I uninstalled the RMagick gem, and installed the ruby library available in the Ubuntu packages. I’ll put instructions for this in another Blog post.
Hope you like the new design, I certainly feel it was worth all the effort it took, though I’m slightly disappointed that my search isn’t working for the moment.
