I had enough of hearing about how wonderful Ruby On Rails is, so I wanted to see it for myself. Being the type of person who’s interested in many things all at the same time, I had a reason to try out another much-talked about thing. In order to properly try out RoR, I wanted a decent web server, so I installed Ubuntu Linux. Ubuntu is by far the easiest Linux distro I’ve used thus far. As such, its installation is quite basic – aiming at the desktop user demographic. But that didn’t stop me, and Ubuntu makes it simple to add what you want. Sometimes I used apt-get and other times I used the GUI app that allows you to search for and install new and updated packages.
First, I needed web server software, so installing and configuring Apache 2.0 was my top priority. The next thing that I installed was PHP 5.0; I’m familiar with 3.x and 4.x but I thought I should begin to explore 5. MySQL 5 wasn’t available in the repository at the time, so I installed the latest 4 release. To make life easier, I installed PHPMyAdmin; normally I prefer a command line but sometimes I just need to stave the RSI symptoms. Then came time to install the Ruby interpreter. Finally, using Gems, I installed Rails.
After browsing some tutorials, I saw how easy it was to generate the skeleton of a data-driven web application with Ruby On Rails. As such, it got me thinking of what’s possible now that a lot of overhead is taken care of by RoR. I just need a way to narrow down my list of possible project ideas.
Take a look at my screenshots below of my Ubuntu web server.
php_info() | RoR WEBrick | PHPMyAdmin
Total time to get everything installed and configured = 1.5 hours 
EDIT (09.05.2006): If you’re interested in learning how to install PHPMyAdmin on Ubuntu Linux, I’ve posted something explaining how to accomplish that here.
