Why Linux?

What I needed to do
I wanted to set up a server in the office (we're a start-up, so one person has many roles) that could be used for various purposes (web server, FTP server, router, traffic shaper, etc.) but I hardly knew how to do any. In the end, it just ended up become a web server and an FTP server.

Ruby on Rails
A big motivator for me was to set up a Ruby on Rails (RoR) server that we could mess around with, install packages and such. As soon as I'm able to successfully do so, I'll post the steps here! In the mean time, you'll see posts about various things you can do in Linux.

The Flavors of Linux
Linux comes in a variety of flavors. I've only used five of them myself - namely Red Hat, Mandrake, CentOS, Fedora Core, and Ubuntu. I've only used Fedora Core (FC) and Ubuntu extensively however. In the office I run a CentOS server, at home I run a Fedora Core server, and when I feel stubborn I run Ubuntu on my laptop.

I chose to run FC at home because it seems quite a popular choice for a non-enterprise server. I'm able to find a lot of material on it when I search in Google. In the office, I run CentOS because a guy who is my Linux guru swears by it. On my laptop, as a desktop, I sometimes run Ubuntu because it just works. FC and CentOS are very similar, it's just that FC is more up-to-date when it comes to the software available. Anyway, I could also afford to run amok with the server at home - salaries don't depend on it.

Command Line? Yuck!
Most Linux flavors have desktop that looks a bit like Windows XP, but most of the time I feel like the desktops are half-baked, merely forcing the issue.

The power then lies in the command line. Yuck? Well, no, not really. It's pretty nifty once you get the hang of it. Plus, I'm able to have the server on in the office, and I just log in from my house via Putty, and even with low bandwidth, you could work well since almost all communication is done through text. It's like I'm back in the old DOS days (maybe, just maybe some of you can relate).

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In the next articles I'll be introducing less and actually have some technical discussions.