Super Soft Cafe

I’ve been experimenting with Linux distros lately. It’s all because of this web hosting, this server I built. I used Fedora 8 due to it’s packages being reasonably up to date, having the features I want as standard, and being rather stable. Ubuntu looks good, but I would have had to manually install so much software that I need, that it would have been a pain.

Ok. That’s the history.

Now I need a development machine. You know, GUI, looks good, feels good..  Slightly different requirements, and suddenly Ubuntu jumps to mind again, because it does look good, and Ubuntu 8.04 supports encrypted volumes (if you use the alternative install CD). However, so does Fedora 9, and that is similar to my hosting platform (Fedora 8)….   Oh ths choices, I really love Ubuntu for its design, but the package system sucks. Ok, overstating, and really I don’t mean to offend…  What I should say is that it lacks certain packages that I need as standard, say eclipse php, so I have to go rooting around to install it myself, and then resolve all the problems that then occur…  Why do that, when there might be another distro that doesn’t cause me so much pain.

I’ve installed Ubuntu 8.04, Fedora 9 and Fedora 8 on VMs. Ubuntu 8.04 is really pleasent to use, but, well, see above…  Fedora 9 is a royal pain in the arse to install. Try setting the timezone to GMT in the installer! Not only doesn’t it work, it crashes the installer. Fedora 8, reliable as ever, installed without a problem…  Has everything I need, and happens to be the same environment as my hosting platform, which is excellent for testing….   So what’s the problem (queue title)? No encrypted installation.

I really want that encryption. This is my hosting platform and development environment we are talking about here. It will contain sensative data…  So the solution?..  Frankly I absolutely cannot take credit for this next bit, so here’s a link to the solution, installing Fedora 8 with an encrypted root :-)..

http://www.tummy.com/Community/Articles/cryptoroot-f8/

Sorted!

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 12th, 2008 at 9:17 am and is filed under linux. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.