I’m still using Ubuntu on my laptop and it just keeps getting better. Clare and I have started up a website project which has meant I’ve been doing more in depth php development work. I really love how easy it is to get a LAMP system up and running for seamless local web development. This makes it really simple to tweak and play with things on the fly. This discovery was really great and I’ve been loving it for the last couple of weeks. However, I’ve just now discovered something that might make all of that obsolete.

I started reading the Official Ubuntu Book and it casually mentioned the Connect to Server feature. Basically you drop out the Places menu, hit Connect to Server and give it the ssh details of your remote development environment. It then opens up the remote filesystem as if it were a standard window. I’m now accessing my server on the other side of the world as if it were sitting on my local system. Admittedly it’s a little slower than working with files locally, but it’s a damned sight better than buggering about working through ftp on a Windows system. Additionally, ssh is nice and secure whereas ftp is most certainly not.

Until now I’ve been working on my site locally with the idea of gzipping up all my files and my SQL database and uploading it to the server as a job lot once I’ve done. Now that I’m armed with this knowledge, I’ll likely just start working directly on the server. It’ll mean less uploading hassles ultimately. The only danger is that I may be tempted to use more absolute paths in my code, which is just poor form. Oh well, I’m a bad man. I might just stick the whole site behind an .htaccess file to avoid the great unwashed getting a look at it while I’m done and buggering up my brand integrity. (Shit, can you tell I just did a marketing subject? It’s getting into my brain.)

It’s exams time for me at the moment, and I just put away a three hour accounting exam. THREE FREAKING HOURS! It was brutal but I’m fairly sure I passed. The day was not without incident, however. There was a storm raging all last night, and at some point in the night something tripped the circuit breaker. I’m not sure what it was, but the result was that my alarm didn’t go off. I woke up 30 minutes before I was due to sit down, completely freaked out. I managed to cram in a shower and breakfast and get to the exam only 10 minutes late. So I didn’t lose much time, but it did mean I couldn’t revise my notes before heading in. Nevertheless, I think it all worked out.

Just gotta get through Management (gah) Marketing and Economics.

I just got Ubuntu installed on Clare’s laptop. It only has 256meg RAM that’s shared with the video card so it was running like a pig even with XP. Honestly, who manufactures a system with only 256meg of RAM? It was a battle because the Ubuntu and Kubuntu livecds require at least 256 to run, and they were both failing. Xubuntu started up, but ran like a dog.

Any of the three versions will run on systems as low as 128mb, you just need to use the standard installer rather than the livecd. Only trouble is, because I’m stupid, it took me a while to figure that out. Anyway, I downloaded the alternate installation cd and eventually got it happening, and now I am the smartest man alive.

Also, the kde desktop looks pretty cool except for the fact it uses Konquerer. If there was a version of kde that used Nautilus and Firefox I’d be sold. Nevertheless, I might check it out in the near future, since it looks cool.