WAMP to LAMP

I'm starting a series to document my progress on converting a very specialized WAMP server over to a LAMP server.

WAMP = Windows, Apache, MySQL, PHP
LAMP = Linux, etc.

I am going to name this box Pericles (Mostly for the sake of giving it a tag in the blog so that you can read all about its life by clicking Pericles here or on the sidebar.)

To begin with, I want to explain why I was using a WAMP server to begin with. Most people either go all Microsoft or all Open Source. This server was born to fulfill one pressing need: A friend of mine had a website already written in ASP that he needed a new hosting provider for, and neither of us had time to deal with anything as serious as a rewrite at that time. So, we found a neat plug-in for Apache on windows that allowed it to execute ASP code. This worked, and our small Web-hosting business was born.

Fast-forward two years.

We now host around twenty websites on this box, and the need for ASP is gone because the original site has been rewritten in PHP. Furthermore, the specs on that box were outdated when we started, and it is time for a faster CPU. We bought a new system at the Day After Thanksgiving sale and we are now ready to go Open Source.

We've installed Ubuntu 6.10 (Edgy Eft) from the Server disc, and then added the ubuntu-desktop package manually to get a GUI desktop. We need the GUI desktop for a couple of reasons: 1) We're new at administering Linux and it helps us feel a little more confident. 2)
I've developed a few tools over the past two years that handle frequent back-end tasks as Windows applications. I don't have time to port them all at once, so I am going to have to do it piece by piece, thus I will run the unported tools by using Wine in the meantime.

Once I got Edgy booting smoothly and configured for our graphics card (it required a resolution tweak using dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg to get it looking correct on our LCD) this is our official starting point.

To follow our ongoing drama, click on the Pericles category/label in the sidebar.