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It's been a productive (if at times frustrating) weekend. I resolved to finally get my old IBM x345 server configured for Rails development use by the end of the weekend. Until now I've been using my HP Tablet PC as the MySQL server with no version control for the development files. That was fine for learning and doing non-critical applications. It's time for something more solid.
I don't know much about Linux, and my command-line days were far behind me until I started working with Rails. In the past I have used Mac/OS extensively, and for the past several years have been using Windows exclusively. I have installed several distributions of Linux over the last 6 or so years, but have always given up in frustration and gone back to Windows. This despite my ambivalent feelings about the folks in Redmond. It always seemed the path of least resistance. Now it seems I have both the incentive and the lack of choice when it comes to doing serious Rails work.
I started off with the Server distribution of Ubuntu 7.10 "Gutsy Gibbon" http://www.ubuntu.com/. Something went wrong during the installation, and I started over with the Workstation version. That was fine until some configuration change I made caused the video to go into some weird incompatibility mode. No amount of Google research and tinkering fixed it, so I started again with the server version. I figured a character-mode interface wasn't likely to mess up the video. That would be one less problem to sort out, at the expense of working at the command prompt.
This time things pretty much fell into place. I accepted the automatic LAMP and SSH Server installation options, and made sure to configure for a static IP number on my network. Most of the work was then done from an SSH client http://www.ssh.com/ on my XP machine. Once I got familiar with the basic Linux commands for navigation and VI editing, I just went at things in more or less this order: SSH Server, Webmin configuration, Ruby, Gems, and Rails installation, Subversion installation. Getting Subversion configured and working from my XP NetBeans client took the most time, as I was looking up different references at each step of the process. I also had a minor connectivity issue from SQLyog http://www.webyog.com/ to MySQL, which came down to access permissions.
So I have now successfully recreated my current project database from the Migration files, committed the project to Subversion, and confirmed the integrity of all the steps by reviewing the resulting files on the server. The one thing I have not done is promote the Rails files to Apache and run them from there. That's the next part of this process, then back to development work.
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