The Shed

So you’ve installed Ubuntu, and you’re pretty damn happy about it. It’s still all a bit weird and new, but you’re amazed at how fast it runs, how flexible it is, and just how fucking beautiful the world looks when the light from the setting sun streams through your window just so, and isn’t it amazing that people would be willing to invest so much time in order to give you something so wonderful, for free.

One very important thing to remember is this: Don’t be a Dick about it.

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Okay, so a few posts ago, I created a makefile that compiles a .as file into a .swf, then launches it in a browser. Only problem is, I have to call that from the terminal, which is a bit tedious. I’m working on one particular flex project for a while, so I decided to make it work for me more easily. Here’s where Ubuntu comes into its own - sometimes it can be hard to work out how things are done, but you can really get your machine running exactly the way you want it.

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Well, I’m about done, really. Just going to install some apps. Here are 3 of my favourites.

1. Eclipse: A great multi-purpose programming platform. Install it from the Add/Remove tool, or manually for the latest version.
2. Battle for Wesnoth: An awesome turn-based strategy with a fantasy theme and playable campaigns.
3. Blender: A 3d modelling program. WARNING: This program appears to have a seriously fucked up user interface when you first use it (I couldn’t even figure out how to close it - had to hard-shutdown my computer). But if you put in the effort to learn it (there are websites out there to help) it quite quickly burns itself into your neural pathways until it becomes intuitive, to the point where you find yourself trying to use its features in other programs.

Thankyou, Adobe, for going Open Source with swf! Now, it took me a while to find out how to get the flex compiler working in Ubuntu, but it’s pretty easy when it comes down to it.

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I’ll let you know as soon as I work it out myself

Now, by default, Apache’s webroot is /var/www/ which I don’t like. I want my webroot in my /home partition, because I don’t want to lose my data when I install a new OS, and because I just think that’s the right place for user data.

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Coming from a web programming background, one of the first things I want on any new install is a webserver, then I want a server-side scripting language, then a database for it to talk to. Here’s how to set up your LAMP (Linux-Apache-MySQL-PHP)

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So, for international legal reasons, some packages are not included in the base install of ubuntu. But you want them. Really want them - they let you do things like watch video.

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I’m reinstalling Ubuntu at the moment, and thought I’d do a series of posts about what I did after the install to turn my machine into a freakish development powerhouse!!!

Hopefully they’ll be useful to someone out there…

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