Upgrading the Development Box

As we undertake this new process, I deviated from my core mission here by taking the time to upgrade my development box to a new operating system — xubuntu 11.10, in my case.  My development box is an old Compaq desktop computer that I bought at a surplus reseller for less than $100 a few years ago and which I’ve used to hack around on.  My MacBook Pro (and, by extension, yours) is just fine for this purpose.  If you’re anything like me, though, you have tons of other stuff on your main computer, including games and other time wasters, that might distract you.

My venerable dev box came equipped with a 20 GB hard drive and was, until a few moments ago, installed with xubuntu 9.04, which had pieces missing after I tried to update 9.04 to 10.10, but ended up removing lots of pieces that made things work predictably (including causing it to lose the ability to see my wired network).  20 GB of space isn’t very much space these days.  A local hardware surplus vendor started selling 250 GB IDE drives for $29 each, so I decided it would be better just to migrate all my old data later and get started here with a clean installation of the latest version of xubuntu.

After trying to wrestle the old small hard drive out of the dev box, I resorted to removing the master jumper, installing the new big hard drive, and installing xubuntu 11.10 from a CD I burned with my MacBook Pro.  I could have simply upgraded xubuntu 9.04 to 11.10, but I opted to go for a clean install on the bigger drive.  I’ll migrate the postgresql database from the little drive later.

Things to install:

• mysql
• apache
• postgresql
• python 3
• rails 3
• ruby 1.9.1
• sqlite
• google chrome
• vim

Tomorrow, it looks like I’m working on getting things installed, running, and configured for my development purposes.