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Joomla/Mambo, Drupal – CMS heaven!

// April 18th, 2006 // Comments Off // Uncategorized

Well, I’m proud to say that I’ve come a long way from when I started to seriously convert from MS Windows to Linux. I have arrived to a point where I can effectively update/install/remove packages with yum and synaptic using the command line …while also compiling from source(this is where I brag some more) and I can install and do basic configurations for Apache, MySQL, and PHP using vi, gedit…whatever text program. So fun, so fun….and sooooo much light with my new LAMP.

I am really excited, and I should be, because there are so many mature open source content managment systems (CMS) available. Most recently I have been testing out Drupal and Joomla. I am pretty happy with both, but more excited about Drupal and it’s fork, civicspace (well, not sure if a fork, but based off of drupal) because of its social-activismish preference.

Both Drupal and Joomla are pretty simple to install and use. (both take advantage of a web autoinstaller) Drupal is a little more complex, but I think because it’s more robust of a CMS than Joomla.

Civicspace, derived from Drupal and causing a stir in grassroots campaigning via Howard Dean during the presidential race, comes bundled with some really powerful components like CiviCRM, CiviContribute and an Event & Calendar system which really rocks. This totally blew me away. To think (I am still absorbing how gracious I am to have linux for FREE) that CiviCRM and CiviContribute are free, not to mention the CMS itself….!!! It’s hard for me to imagine how much it would be if I were to purchase proprietary software that did the same, literally thousands of dollars!

CiviCRM would equate to what many businesses call their sales database to which many solely rely for survival! I would love to become an expert in implementing this so that nonprofits could harness its power and ability!

I’ve been excited a lot more lately in large part to my fanatical reading and tinkering with open source softwares.

I have a test site up online HERE using mambo CMS. (I hope to make live a Civicspace or Drupal based site in the near future) Feel free to try it out!

Oh yeah, and while we are talking about my new test site for mambo, I wanted to mention that the site hosts for free with no ads, 1 MySQL database and lots of resonable space and traffic quotas. Check it out if you wanna create your own CMS and put it online all for free!!!

Penguins are my friend! Part I

// April 6th, 2006 // Comments Off // Uncategorized

Probably about a month ago from this writing I was explaining how I was beginning in my path down Open Source, a revelation from my previous job.

Well, now I am in! Actually I took a head first dive.

(this post may be longer than usual)
Saying that, let me tell you all what I did, give you some specs, and tell you some hardships.

Here is my physical computer details:

Dell Dimension L667
Pentium III 664 MHz
120GB hard drive
RAM 512MB
(pretty standard computer, with necessary components ‘ex. integrated ethernet, VGA monitor, etc.)

Operating Systems

Now this is where I get a little overkill, but I truely wanted to see which linux distribution to use based on its flexibility, beginner usability, and documentation-support.

My father bought me VMware Workstation 5 for my Windows XP (thanks dad), but I also created a dual boot using GRUB (Grand Unified Bootloader).

VMware made it a breeze to configure settings like how much RAM usage to allocate, hard disk space, audio, ethernet, all with a simple gui (graphical user interface). What is also nice is that since I do not have a cd burner, I didnt have to get someone to burn me cd’s of the images for the different distributions because you can set the path to where the ‘iso’ is located on your host operating system (OS) I will like to mention that Ubuntu sends FREE, and yes I said FREE, cd’s to anyone who asks, which I also have 4 sets. They ship in attractive packaging and contain the live CD (to run from your cd drive) and a 1 disk installation cd.

So, with the ease of VMware, I proceeded to install Fedora Core 4, Ubuntu Breezy Badger, Gentoo, and Mandrake based on some internet reviews and recommendations from friends, familiy, and IT professionals.

For each OS, I allocated 10GB of space and pretty much used the default config for each. One really tricky thing did not have anything to do with the installation, but actually getting the VMware tools installed on each system because I have an older video card so my screens (after the install) were 640X480 and not rendering properly. Compounding that it was hard to view the screens and my beginner status, it was very difficult realizing that I couldn’t just double click on something and have it install it. In Fedora, I had to use the rpm and Debian based, I had to unpack and compile using the tarball file. After installation of the VMware tools, however, everything worked smoothly.

The dual boot was easier than I thought! When you install MS Windows, it takes up the whole hard drive, so you have to shrink it. After reading some, and installing Mandrake Linux, I discovered that Mandrake has a nice gui utility that lets you graphically shrink the windows partition. So I did that, then installed Fedora Core 4, removing all other linux partitions. This worked well and fast.

After testing out each OS, I dropped Mandrake and Gentoo for now, and concentrated on Fedora Core 4 and Ubuntu Breezy Badger because after using them all, they seemed the easiest to use and have the largest base of support forums and tutorials. My father is also Red Hat certified, so my choice of Fedora might be a little biased since I have on-demand support whenever.

Books
Seeing this as a long-term investment, I also bought some books for reference as well as guides to aid me. I will note though that you can also find everything in these books somewhere online for free; it just takes some looking and printing if you want to read while you are away from a computer.

I am also a big fan of O’reilly books because they seem really easy to understand and provide lots of content.

I bought (keeping in mind my desire to use a lamp architecture):
Running Linux 5th ed.
Linux in a Nutshell 5th ed.
MYSQL in a Nutshell
Information Dashboard Design
Apache: The Definitive Guide
Web Service Essentials
Learning PHP5

A long list, I know, but they have already helped me so much.

Finally on linux!!!

// March 5th, 2006 // Comments Off // Uncategorized

It is so gratifying to say that I am finally using linux!!!

I am still on MS Windows, but one step closer to leaving it behind!

It is both exciting and liberating to be able to change things to make them how I want them while also seeing exactly what the operating system is doing!

I ended up using VMware, which is a virtualization software upon my dad’s recommendation. It was nice not having to create a dual boot, and I also have added 2 linux distributions, Fedora Core 4 and Ubuntu (Breezy Badger). It just sucks that my host platform is the memory hog of XP.

After being in GUI world for so long, it was really nice to play around with the terminal and moving around the filesystem.

VMware lets you allocate RAM, diskspace and has virtual drivers for all hardware devices so it makes it pretty easy to configure. After installation, I realized that it also is pretty easy to do this with linux without the virtualisation software, but VMware lets you take snapshots of the configurations so you can always revert back to an older config.

I am still rather new to these 2 distributions, but here is what I found so far:

Fedora Core 4:
-Installer is more graphical
-takes 4 cd’s to install!!
-has an interactive startup
-seems to want to install way toomany modules than needed (at least for me – did the workstation install)
-has an annoying subscription updater from red hat that always loads on startup
-had trouble with video card configuration (might be because of VMware)
-sound was harder to install (also might be due to VMware)
-the default text editor is a little hard to use (vi)
-overall not too hard to configure

Ubuntu (Breezy Badger)
-can’t login at root, must do it from usr login (i assume good default setting)
-isn’t bundled with support for ‘rpm’ files, just tarball
-have to have a little more understanding of terminal usage (at least for me)
-has pretty awesome package installer
-nice graphical interface (layout similar to fedora)
-had same troubles with display as in fedora (must be VMware issue) after i installed vmware tools, things were cool
-network settings weren’t as intuitive as fedora (maybe biased because father helped with fedora and i followed with ubuntu == father is Red Hat expert)

Overall both operating systems are up and running and doing good. as I learn more I would like to post more comparisons.

(Thanks to Brian for suggestion on using Ubuntu too! I really like it!)