Idiot's Step by Step Guide for Setting up Ubuntu

I recently got my own unmanaged VPS and I had to quickly learn how to be my own System Administrator (SysAdmin). The documentation on the intertubes is horrific and I was looking for any easy way to maintain my new box.

If you're like me and started using Linux on the Mac OS X, and you like MacPorts, then you'll be happy to learn that Ubuntu has something very similar in apt-get. Actually aptitude does an even better job than apt-get because it'll install dependencies and handle a lot of the clean up, just like MacPorts.

I'm using a clean install of Ubuntu 8.10 (Intrepid), but I'm sure these will work for most future versions of Ubuntu as well. Simply, ssh into your box, and run the following on the command line. Just answer Yes or 'Y' when prompted.

  • apt-get update
  • apt-get install aptitude
  • aptitude update
  • locale-gen en_US.UTF-8
  • /usr/sbin/update-locale LANG=en_US.UTF-8
  • aptitude safe-upgrade
    • select UTF-8, then press enter for "OK"
  • aptitude full-upgrade
  • aptitude install ubuntu-minimal
  • aptitude install ubuntu-standard
  • aptitude install build-essential
  • aptitude install subversion

References:

Comments

You can also use chef solo to

You can also use chef solo to build your system as well. If you want a nice and sexy
ruby box with Apache +passenger you can fork and modify the following repo:
http://github.com/retr0h/chef_solo_web_with_passenger/tree/master

I use this for all my ubuntu builds, and it doesn't require a sysadmin to run it :)

John

FYI, I figured I'd keep this

FYI, I figured I'd keep this blog focused on research papers and academic content and not mix in my wacky adventures in programming.

So if you'd like to read about my pythonic adventures in code soup, head on over the PythonFilter

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