From: Jane Gilles
Date: Wednesday 8 Oct 2008 12.19pm
To: David Thorne
Subject: Overdue account

Dear David,
Our records indicate that your account is overdue by the amount of $233.95. If you have already made this payment please contact us within the next 7 days to confirm payment has been applied to your account and is no longer outstanding.

Yours sincerely, Jane Gilles

From: David Thorne
Date: Wednesday 8 Oct 2008 12.37pm
To: Jane Gilles
Subject: Re: Overdue account

Dear Jane,
I do not have any money so am sending you this drawing I did of a spider instead. I value the drawing at $233.95 so trust that this settles the matter.

Regards, David.

From: Jane Gilles
Date: Thursday 9 Oct 2008 10.07am
To: David Thorne
Subject: Overdue account

Dear David,
Thank you for contacting us. Unfortunately we are unable to accept drawings as payment and your account remains in arrears of $233.95. Please contact us within the next 7 days to confirm payment has been applied to your account and is no longer outstanding.

Yours sincerely, Jane Gilles

From: David Thorne
Date: Thursday 9 Oct 2008 10.32am
To: Jane Gilles
Subject: Re: Overdue account

Dear Jane,
Can I have my drawing of a spider back then please.

Regards, David.

From: Jane Gilles
Date: Thursday 9 Oct 2008 11.42am
To: David Thorne
Subject: Re: Re: Overdue account

Dear David,
You emailed the drawing to me. Do you want me to email it back to you?

Yours sincerely, Jane Gilles

From: David Thorne
Date: Thursday 9 Oct 2008 11.56am
To: Jane Gilles
Subject: Re: Re: Re: Overdue account

Dear Jane,

Yes please.

Regards, David.

From: Jane Gilles
Date: Thursday 9 Oct 2008 12.14pm
To: David Thorne
Subject: Re: Re: Re: Re: Overdue account

Attached [spider.gif]

From: David Thorne
Date: Friday 10 Oct 2008 09.22am
To: Jane Gilles
Subject: Who’s spider is that?

Dear Jane,
Are you sure this drawing of a spider is the one I sent you? This spider only has seven legs and I do not feel I would have made such an elementary mistake when I drew it.

Regards, David.

From: Jane Gilles
Date: Friday 10 Oct 2008 11.03am
To: David Thorne
Subject: Re: Who’s spider is that?

Dear David,
Yes it is the same drawing. I copied and pasted it from the email you sent me on the 8th. David your account is still overdue by the amount of $233.95. Please make this payment as soon as possible.

Yours sincerely, Jane Gilles

From: David Thorne
Date: Friday 10 Oct 2008 11.05am
To: Jane Gilles
Subject: Automated Out of Office Response

Thank you for contacting me. I am currently away on leave, travelling through time and will be returning last week.

Regards, David.

From: David Thorne
Date: Friday 10 Oct 2008 11.08am
To: Jane Gilles
Subject: Re: Re: Who’s spider is that?

Hello, I am back and have read through your emails and accept that despite missing a leg, that drawing of a spider may indeed be the one I sent you. I realise with hindsight that it is possible you rejected the drawing of a spider due to this obvious limb omission but did not point it out in an effort to avoid hurting my feelings. As such, I am sending you a revised drawing with the correct number of legs as full payment for any amount outstanding. I trust this will bring the matter to a conclusion.

Regards, David.

From: Jane Gilles
Date: Monday 13 Oct 2008 2.51pm
To: David Thorne
Subject: Re: Re: Re: Who’s spider is that?

Dear David,
As I have stated, we do not accept drawings in lei of money for accounts outstanding. We accept cheque, bank cheque, money order or cash. Please make a payment this week to avoid incurring any additional fees.

Yours sincerely, Jane Gilles

From: David Thorne
Date: Monday 13 Oct 2008 3.17pm
To: Jane Gilles
Subject: Re: Re: Re: Re: Who’s spider is that?

I understand and will definitely make a payment this week if I remember. As you have not accepted my second drawing as payment, please return the drawing to me as soon as possible. It was silly of me to assume I could provide you with something of completely no value whatsoever, waste your time and then attach such a large amount to it.

Regards, David.

From: Jane Gilles
Date: Tuesday 14 Oct 2008 11.18am
To: David Thorne
Subject: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Who’s spider is that?

Attached [spider2.gif]

Source

There were, however, a few good posts that would fit on here nicely — and when I received a notice about expiration of one of my old domains, Sheeped.com, I took the time to transfer some of them to PatrickMN.com. If you’re wondering why the sidebar now links back to 2006, this is why.

The posts are:

• How I Taught Myself Programming by Making a Game
• How To: Set Up Ubuntu Linux 6.06 LTS LAMP Server
• Sick of Your Slow Internet Connection? OpenDNS Solves!

Enjoy!

Let me introduce you to a few.

Teeworlds

Imagine Soldat combined with a link gun á la Scorpion (Mortal Kombat) and the same body layout as the Weebl characters. That’s Teeworlds. In other words: Pure awesomeness. This baby will keep you entertained for many a tee-fragging/dragging/bashing hour. Teeworlds is a perfect mix of Quake, Worms, Soldat and pie-loving. Remarkably violent whilst cute.

In comparison to Soldat, the weapons arsenal is more akin that of Quake 3, the jetpack is replaced by a Spiderman-style link gun and your primary weapon is a giant wooden hammer.

Whoever said games need to have lots of gore to be interesting? Give us tees with rocket launchers, link guns and ninjas (yes, there are ninjas) in a cartoon environment and we’re set!

Free. Available for Windows, OS X and Linux.
Website | Download

N-Game

N-Game is a unique 2D puzzle/action platform game somewhat similar to Lode Runner. The main character, you, is a ninja (yes, the N is for ninja!) trapped in a world of well-meaning, inadvertently homicidal robots.

What makes this game awesome, apart of course from there being ninjas, is its slamming ragdoll physics system. Limbs flying around and about is never a bad thing.

A very frustrating, yet very fun and addictive game.

Free. Available for Windows, OS X and Linux.
Website | Download

Elasto Mania (Elma)

Boing boing. Get ready to bounce up and about collecting ‘em apples. Elasto Mania, or Elma, is about apples, flowers and bikes with super-elastic wheels. Drive over a hill, plummet to the ground and recoil into the air, all while not sustaining trauma to the skull.

This was probably one of the first game to include ‘physics’ (the wheels stretch and bend). That, combined with the ability to change your facing by pressing Space makes this a game that is adept at consuming a lot of your time.

Shareware, $9.95. Available for Windows.
Website | Download (Trial)

Phun

Phun is a 2D physics sandbox. Create whatever you’d like, wherever you’d like and see what would happen in the real world. I think I’d be a genius today if I’d had this to play with as a child — there’s virtually no limit to what you can make here.

The playful synergy of science and art is novel, and makes Phun as educational as it is entertaining.

It may look like a toy, but Phun is based on highly competitive technologies for interactive multiphysics simulation, ranging from novel physical models and variational integrators to high performance numerical methods.

Free. Available for Windows, OS X and Linux.
Website | Download

Soldat

Of course, the obligatory Soldat. This is a fun little 2D shooter based on games like Quake, Counter-Strike, Liero and Worms. Choose from an arsenal of weapons á la Counter-Strike and blow stuff to oblivion and beyond. And while you’re blowing stuff up, gaze in awe as the games ragdoll physics system makes the aftermath a nice show of debris tumbling down hills and bouncing off crates.

If you need to get around, your character is very fittingly equipped with a jetpack. Oh, and one of the selectable weapons is a minigun.

Free. Available for Windows and Linux (Wine).
Website | Download

Winterbells

Rabbits. Bells. Pigeons. Winterbells is a flash game that’s somewhat like Pinball — except you control the ball with your mouse, and there are no flippers, should you miss a bopper.

For each bell you hit, the score for each bell goes up a little. For each pigeon you hit, your current score doubles. Yes, doubles. You’ll find that if you hit a few birds, your high score quickly becomes too high to count!

The game isn’t the least bit complicated, but you’ll find it isn’t too easy keeping your focus. Very, very addictive.

Free. Available for all browsers with Flash.
Website | Play

The World’s Hardest Game

Let’s just say the title isn’t exactly an exaggeration. This game will piss you off. Immensely. But it’s fun (generally), and that’s what matters! It’s a 2D puzzle game where the objective is to collect coins and get to the finish area without getting hit by all kinds of crap. It’s really very hard.

There is also a The Worlds Hardest Game 2, which is basically just additional levels. It can be found here.

Free. Available for all browsers with Flash.
Website | Play

Praise goes to the authors of these games. They certainly deserve it; they have managed to make games so original, so enticing that top-notch physics engines and two-digit DirectX version numbers merely serve as unnecessary distractions.

Honorable mentions go to all of the text-based MUDs that still keep thousands of players entertained to this day — without any graphics.

And yes, I know I like ninjas.

I usually don’t delve into politics, much less write about it, and this is probably the last time you’ll see it on this blog, but I feel this is sufficiently important to warrant a few words. That’s all I can do as a European in this matter, anyway — say a few words and hope to instill some thought. If one person reconsiders as a result of this post, it’ll have been a success.

Dear Republican

I am not a U.S. citizen, but like you, I too am a citizen of Earth. I am not politically committed, yet I obviously care for this planet’s future. In two months, we will know whether the next President of the United States is Barack Obama or John McCain. That decision will greatly impact not just the United States, but everyone, everywhere. Please, dear Republican, if you’ve yet to cast your vote, consider what I have to say.

John McCain is getting a free ride from the press and his corporate sponsors, and quite frankly, it’s disgusting. Every fraction of Barack Obama’s life is turned upside-down while McCain, a great american hero, is at the wheels of his so-called “Straight Talk Express“. Countless times now, bloopers on the part of John McCain have been edited out of newscasts — whoopsies of a frightening magnitude, like forgetting what country you’re in conflict with, or who the enemy is. The John McCain you think you know is not the same person you’ll find if you spend 10 minutes away from the Fox network.

John McCain is a former Prisoner of War, something I fully respect. I can’t imagine how it’s like to endure torture. But please, dear Republican, realize that having the fortitude to withstand torture does not automatically make you fit to serve as Commander in Chief of the most powerful armed forces on Earth. It does not make you intelligent, nor does it grant you impeccable judgement. It does not automatically make you a great leader capable of controlling a superpower.

The truth is, ‘former Prisoner of War’ seems to be John McCain’s trumph card. Nevermind the qualities or shortcomings of his opponent, think about this for a second: Can you think of anything other than ‘War Hero’ that justifies John McCain for President? Are those TV ads ever anything more than “…he was a great hero…”? Please, dear Republican, realize that feeling favorably about the heroic John McCain of the past is different from voting for someone who agrees with George Bush and doesn’t know what half of what he’s saying means, or how many houses he owns. Realize that if John McCain becomes the next President of the United States, George Bush has effectively been granted a third term.

But you don’t want to vote for Barack Obama. He’s not committed enough. He hasn’t gone through enough. Dear Republican, Barack Obama is black. He is the democratic nominee for President, and he is a black man who wasn’t born into riches or social status. Think about that for a second. He wants to change your country for the better — give him a chance. He’d have to do pretty badly to be worse than the alternative. He’s not flawless, nobody is, but his core principles are befitting what the United States was, should be, and can be again. That great country to the west that we all look up to, not the once-shining beacon of western civilization that we constantly shake our heads at and sigh in frustration.

I can think of reasons not to vote for Obama too, Joe Biden for example. I’m an avid internet user and I support free speech, and Barack Obama’s vice president is against net neutrality — I have reasons to be conflicted. But dear Republican, it doesn’t matter. Not one bit. It comes down to a 4-year extension of the worst 8 years in recent history or something different.

And it’s you, dear American, who has the power to decide which it’s going to be.

As you’ve undoubtedly deduced, my name is Patrick. I’m 20 years old at the time of writing, and I was born and raised in the Kingdom of Denmark, a small country bordering Germany as well as the Baltic and North seas.

I’ve always had a keen interest in computers and technology, from the Atari console in the Officer’s Lounge of a Maersk ship I had the opportunity to travel around the world on at the age of 4, to the family PC, an IBM Aptiva, at which I spent a lot of my time teaching myself such “programming languages” as MS-Batch and QBasic. Later I managed to install Red Hat Linux 3.0 (much to the remaining family’s dismay) and moved on to learning C. At age 11 I launched my first (albeit simple) text-based roleplaying game programmed in C.

This website serves as my outlet for writing about whatever happens to be on my mind. I’m not restricting myself to a particular niche, although I suspect the majority of my articles will concern technology in some fashion, as that is what I’m most passionate about. If you think of yourself as a computer nerd, and you enjoy spending your spare time fiddling with things related to computers and technology in general, chances are you’ll like a good deal of my rants.

One thing this blog will not be is your everyday run-at-the-mill tech news echo-blog. There are plenty of those out there, all reporting the same stories, ten times a day, every day. I’ve tried running one before, and I found it daunting and boring. I don’t want to tell you when every single version of X software is released, there are plenty of blogs and social news sites that will. I want my posts to have substance and an expiration date further than a few weeks into the future — basically, I want them to be as timeless as is possible when writing about things that are subject to Moore’s Law.

Let’s see if I can keep my word!

Briefly about MUDs: If you’ve never heard of or played MUDs, I strongly encourage you to give them a try. They may not have graphics, but that is exactly what gives them power. They’re like books — if you have a decent imagination, you don’t need graphics. In fact, I’d play a MUD over a game with crappy graphics any day. MUDs are also incredibly educational — if I hadn’t played MUDs, I wouldn’t be speaking nor writing English nearly as well as I do today (I’m not a native speaker), and I probably wouldn’t know much about programming either.

After a while I decided I wanted to create my own game. I downloaded a C codebase and started hacking away at the source, experimenting and learning the basics of programming (I was completely clueless before MUDs). Creating something out of nothing was no longer a fantasy, I was actually doing it.

Eventually, my little project evolved into more than just a spare-time thing and was serving a couple thousand players, admittedly not simultaneously but I was still quite impressed, and I had learned many a valuable lesson about everything from love to programming.

I took the plunge into the world of programming without reading any books on the subject. I am a person who learns best from practice, so it wasn’t all that bad. I bent, I broke and I played with the code and eventually I learned all about functions, pointers, memory management, and all the other fun feats of C. The only downside to this was that I was not learning contemporary programming languages and methods. Until recently, that has been the single biggest reason why I haven’t recommended that anyone interested in programming start out by trying to create their own MUD. MUD codebases are old… Well, most of them, anyway.

NakedMud

NakedMud is a modern MUD codebase whose core is still in the good old C, but everything else is accomplished using Python as an embedded scripting language. Don’t let C discourage you — if you want, you can leave the core alone, do everything in Python and only make the small, necessary changes in C. Python is incredibly easy to learn, and games are much more fun to work with than traditional learning tools, right? Could it be any better? Besides, as soon as you’re comfortable with Python, modifying C will be painless, too.

Geoff Hollis, the creator of NakedMud, describes the codebase as a clean and easy way to create your own MUD, without all the usual hassle that other codebases bring — and that’s exactly what it is. NakedMud’s source is beautifully clear and concise in comparison to other codebases, making it a perfect tool for those who want to create their own game for the first time, and have no clue how to do it from scratch. If you want to create your own game, really, use it.

What now?

I won’t go into details about NakedMud as Geoff has literally written books about it. If any of this has even remotely tickled your curiosity, I will, however, end this off by strongly recommending that you learn more on your own. Here’s a few links to get you started:

• MUD - The Wikipedia entry.
• The Mud Connector - The Technorati of MUDs. Helps you find MUDs you want to play.
• NakedMud official website
• NakedMud official mailing list
• NakedMud unofficial website
• Programming with NakedMud (PDF) - An introduction to the NakedMud codebase, by Geoff Hollis.
• Extending NakedMud (PDF) - A comprehensive tutorial on extending NakedMud, by Geoff Hollis.
• Python in NakedMud (PDF) - An introduction to the Python aspect of NakedMud, by Geoff Hollis
• Dive Into Python - A massive book on Python. It’s free and it’s awesome.
• Python - The official website.

The source of the MUD I created, Shattered Dreams MUD (SDMUD), can be found here. As you can probably imagine from what I said about it being my first, it isn’t a masterpiece. If anything, studying the source of it will make you realize what makes NakedMud better than the other, old, mainstream codebases.

The Ubuntu Server has no open ports after the installation and contains only the essential software needed to build a secure server.

Thanks to the Lightbox WordPress plugin, you can click on one of the screenshots below and scroll through them by clicking on the “Prev” “Next” links in the upper right and upper left corners of the screenshot window. Descriptions are provided below each screenshot, allowing you to see a slideshow, with commentary, of the entire installation process — without ever having to close the Lightbox window! You may miss out on some information by doing this, but you’ll certainly see the essentials.

Well, let’s begin!

Notice: The screenshots below may be obsolete, as the Ubuntu website has been redesigned. The other parts of this guide remain current (well, as current as Ubuntu 6.06).

Part 1: Preparing For Installation

Starting with the basics, we’ll find and download the appropriate ISO image for our system architecture. Then we’ll burn it and commence the installation process. If you’ve already downloaded and burnt the right ISO image, feel free to skip to Part 2: Boot-Up and Configuration. Be aware that “Ubuntu 6.06 LTS” is not the same as “Ubuntu 6.06 LTS Server”. They are two seperate images.

Getting the ISO Image

- First off, we’ll head over to Ubuntu.com and click the Server Download link.



- On the Download page, select Ubuntu 6.06 LTS, Ubuntu with long-term support.



- Now select the region closest to you. Which you choose is irrelevant (they’re mirrors, thus no difference in content). I’ll select United States.



- Click on the respective download link for your system architecture. If you’re not sure what to get, chances are PC (x86) is the right one. If you’re running a Mac (NOT the ones with an Intel chipset), get the Mac (PPC) image. If 64-bit, get the 64-bit one, and so on. Please verify that you’re downloading your image in the Server section, not the Desktop, before continuing.

Now grab a cup of coffee or a coke while you wait. You must.

Burning the ISO Image

Now that we’re done downloading the ISO image, we’ll use our favorite burning application to write the ISO to a CD-ROM. It is of utmost importance that you do not just copy the ISO file to a CD, but that you actually burn the image. Most writing applications have a feature called “Write Image”, “Write ISO to Disc”, “Burn ISO”, or similar. In Linux, the ‘k3b’ application (Nero equivalent) can do this with ease, so can Nautilus’ built-in CD writer (right-click the ISO in Gnome). Please see “How to Write ISO Files to CD in Windows” for Windows instructions, and “How do I burn an ISO image to CD in OS X? for Mac OS X instructions.

Get Ready to Install

When you’ve written the ISO image to a CD-ROM, please verify the contents of the disc. There should be several files and folders — if there’s only an .iso-file, you haven’t burnt the ISO. Please see the above instructions on how to burn it rather than copying.

If all looks fine, you’re done with Part 1! Let’s try it out in;

Part 2: Boot-Up and Configuration

Now that you’ve downloaded and burnt the Ubuntu Server ISO image, you’re ready to begin the installation. Go ahead and reboot your server with the CD in. If your system does not automatically boot from the CD-ROM, you’ll need to enable this in your server’s BIOS configuration. This option and the method to access it varies from BIOS to BIOS, but generally you’ll be able to enter the BIOS by pressing either F2 or DEL when your computer is starting up. When you’ve reached the BIOS configuration menu (usually blue), look for any option that states “Boot from CD-ROM” or an option that allows you to configure the priority of each drive. Some BIOSes are set to boot from the harddrive before booting from the CD-ROM. Change it so CD-ROM is the first thing your server tries, then save the settings and reboot.

The screenshot to the right shows how my PhoenixBIOS is configured. The CD-ROM Drive is moved to the top, followed by Hard Drive and other network/removable devices.

Booting Up

Your server’s BIOS should now be set up correctly and should be booting from the CD-ROM drive. Hopefully you’re now seeing what is depicted in the screenshot to the right. Great! Now select Install a LAMP server and hit enter. You have begun the installation process.

Configuring Regional Settings

You’re not very far from having a full-fletched server now. Hang on!

- Now we’ll select the language of our system. Be warned that this is not just for the installation, it is the language your system will use after installation, as well. This is, of course, changeable, but just go with the right language from the get-go. I’ll choose English (it’d suck for you if I chose my native tongue, Danish). Hit Enter.


- Now, similarly, choose your location. The options vary depending on what language you chose in the previous step, so don’t be worried if you don’t see your country listed in the screenshot. If you select ‘other’ you will get a complete listing of languages. I’ll choose United States.


- The installer now asks for your keyboard type. The option displayed should be the correct one, so just hit Enter if it is. If not, try typing something or going through the list of keymaps.


The installer will now configure devices, load additional components, as well as load network hardware. In this How To, I’ll assume that you’re using either ADSL or DSL that does not require authentication. If you’re not, the installation will prompt you to enter the required information.

Configuring Networking

- The installer will now ask you what you want to call your server. Call it anything you want, this can be changed later. I will call mine patricks-server. This is not your username, it’s the servers hostname. It’s what identifies the server on the network.


And the installer detects more hardware…

Congratulations, you’re done with Part 2. Get ready for the hardest part, partitioning. Don’t worry, I’ll take good care of you.

Part 3: Partitioning Your Drives

This is the single hardest part to guide anyone through, remotely. All system setups are different so it’s hard to tell you exactly how to set up your system. Whether or not you’re going to be using LVM, how many partitions to make, etc.

- The standard options are pretty straight-forward, and I recommend you choose one of them if this process scares the living hell out of you. If you do choose one of them, feel free to skip to Part 4: Completing the Installation.


For the rest of this section, I will show you how I set up my system by manual partitioning. Please take my setup loosely — if there’s something that doesn’t fit you or something you’d prefer, adjust accordingly!

Manual Partitioning

- This is the manual partitioning menu. The first two options (if they are shown) will allow you to set up a software RAID and Logical Volume Management. These, if you need them, will have to wait until we have configured our partitions. I will not be configuring either, as they are both unique to each configuration and pretty straight-forward to set up.


- I have one harddrive, SCSI1 (0,0,0), a 268.4GB drive. To partition this drive, I’ll highlight it and hit Enter. A dialog will appear, asking me if I would like to create a new partition table, that will delete anything currently on the drive. I’ll hit Yes.


- This is the menu after deleting all partitions on the drive. Now I’m ready to set up new partitions.


- Select the “FREE SPACE” entry below the drive and hit Enter. You can choose to let the installer set up partitions automatically, or you can make them yourself. I’ll select Create a new partition.


- Our first partition will be the root ( ‘/’ ) partition. This is where all our system files and applications are stored. If you want, you can allocate a percentage of the drive to root, and leave the rest for the ‘/home’ partition. I’d recommend something inside the 15-25GB range for a root you’re going to be using for a long time. Seperating your root and /home is useful if you need to re-install Linux. I’ll assign 20GB to root.


- Unless you’re going to have more than 4 partitions per drive, select Primary here. Logical partitions are ‘fake’ partitions created to circumvent the normal limit of 4 partitions.



- Select Beginning. This tells the installer to position our root partition at the start of the available space.



- You can choose to leave everything as it is here. A little tweak: In Mount Options you can choose to turn ‘noatime’ on, which will give you a significant speed boost. It disables generating a new time stamp every time a file is accessed. When you’re happy, select Done setting up the partition and hit Enter.

Additional Partitions

Now that you know how to set up a new partition, do the following:

- Following the same instructions as before, create a partition in the free space with a size roughly equal to half of your RAM, e.g. 512mb if you have 1GB of RAM. Make it a Primary partition as before, in the Beginning of the free space as well. When you get to the confirmation dialog, highlight the file system type (Use as:) and hit Enter. Select swap area from the menu. Accept the changes. The swap area acts as a substitute if all available RAM is being used.

- Finally, create another partition, but /home rather than /. Ubuntu should automatically suggest this. Have this partition use the remaining space on your drive. Again, you can choose to enable ‘noatime’ to get a performance boost.

Verifying and Finalizing

Your partition table should now look like this (or be similar). If you’re missing the swap space or the /home partition, don’t worry. You can mess around as much as you want. If all goes wrong, delete the entire partition table by selecting the drive itself, and start over.


If you’re all done, hit Finish partitioning and write changes to disk. A confirmation dialog will appear, asking you if you’re sure you want to apply these changes. Double-check the settings and hit Yes if it looks right.

You’re all done with partitioning! Get ready for the fun stuff in

Part 4: Completing the Installation

Now that you’re done partitioning, it’s time to complete the installation!

Setting Up the Timezone

- The installer will ask you what timezone you’re in. Select the one that best fits you and continue. I’ll choose Eastern. If you are prompted to use UTC, hit Yes (unless you have a reason not to).

Users and Passwords

- The first dialog after having entered the timezone asks you for your real name, not the alias you want to log in with.



- Now I’m asked for my desired username. The username should start with a lower-case letter, which can be followed by any combination of numbers and letters. The installer suggests patrick. I’ll go with that.


- Enter the password you’d like to associate with your account. This password will also be the password you use to perform actions that require ‘root’ access. In the next window, confirm the password by typing it again.


Sit back and relax as the installer completes installing Ubuntu Server on your computer. Let the installation process finish, eject the CD, and reboot your system. Congratulations, installation is done!



Linux should now initialize and prompt you for your username and password. If your screen looks something like this, all went well. Feel free to log in.

Setting up LAMP

Wouldn’t it be great if our LAMP server just worked now, without us having to do anything? Well, it does! Try browsing to your servers IP in a browser, in my case http://192.168.0.6. Woot!


It’s time to do a few changes to our LAMP server. Normally, this would be a 3/4-hour process of manually editing config files and testing. Thanks to Ubuntu though, the installer does it all — better too. All we need to do is choose how we want our LAMP server to work.

By default, Apache2 uses /var/www/ as its document root. We’ll want to change this to our home folder in order to reap the space we’ve allocated.

- Log in, in case you haven’t. Type the exact command mkdir www - This will create the folder /home/patrick/www/ which we will be using as the document root of our server.

- Type the exact command: sudo nano -w /etc/apache2/sites-available/default and hit Enter. You will be prompted for your password. Enter it, and a text editor with our site’s config file will open (see screenshot to the right).


- Feel free to set the administrator e-mail to your own. Now, go through the document and replace all occurrences of /var/www/ to /home/patrick/www/, where ‘patrick’ is the username you chose during the installation. Navigate around with the arrow buttons. When done, hit CTRL+X then type Y and Enter to save the changes.


- Time to restart Apache to apply the changes. Type sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart

- Now, let’s see if this really works! Assuming you’re in your home folder (type cd to make sure), type cd www followed by ls. You should see.. nothing. Good.

- Type nano -w index.php
We’ll create a sample PHP script to test if the server and PHP is working. <?php echo "It's working!" ?> will suffice. Again, hit CTRL + X followed by Y and Enter to save the contents.


- Navigate to your server, e.g. http://192.168.0.5 — it works!

You’re done! Your server is working perfectly!

If you’re uncomfortable with the command-line interface, I recommend you look into guides for installing Webmin and phpMyAdmin for Ubuntu. Also, if you would like to administer your server from your own computer, you can install SSH with the command: sudo apt-get install ssh
You can access it with applications like PuTTY.

In order to install phpMyAdmin (and more) with sudo apt-get install, you will first need to enable the Universe repository. There’s a nice guide on how to do that from the CLI here.

Every time you want to access sites via their hostmasks, e.g. ‘www.google.com’ or ‘www.diggdot.us’, rather than their actual ‘names’ (IP addresses), e.g. 64.233.187.99, 64.71.156.11 - a query is sent to your DNS server asking, “What is Google.com?” - and it’s surprising how much slower the page load time can become because of that initial query, regardless of what connection you might have. Some ISP DNS servers have very poor respond times, ultimately leading to slower browsing, but fortunately there’s a solution.

If you use OpenDNS, you let their dedicated servers in various locations respond to your DNS requests instead of your ISP, and there’s a good chance they’ll respond a hell of a lot faster.

If you’re having applications hang with the indication that they’re looking for some host, e.g. Firefox saying “Looking for www.google.com…”, you should really try this out.

Other bonuses include automatic spelling correction, e.g. www.craigslist.og will take you to the .org site - Their server also blocks DNS requests to known phishing sites so your credit card information won’t be stolen.

Try changing your DNS server settings on either your computer or router to the following IP addresses (the OpenDNS servers) and check if it has a positive effect - you don’t need a login, specific operating system or anything like so, it works everywhere:

• 208.67.222.222
• 208.67.220.220

You might be surprised.

For more information, visit www.opendns.com.