Theres a certain class of programs that I refer to as the “cranky” ones. They may work great when all is said and done, but getting to that point can be really hard.
For me, these include sendmail, QuarkXPress, and now Drupal.
As you may know, I started looking a few weeks ago for an easy-to-use CMS (content management system) for my neglected Practical Technology site. I just didnt have the time to keep it up to date manually with Dreamweaver, Fookes Softwares NoteTab, and Nvu.
So, after considering numerous open-source CMS programs, I decided to give Drupal a shot on Kubuntu.
Kubuntu, while a great desktop, was not a good choice for me as a CMS server platform. So, I headed to Novells OpenSUSE 10.
Now, if I had been doing this in a business setting, I would have used either SLES (SUSE Linux Enterprise Server) or RHEL (Red Hat Enterprise Linux). I run both of them in my office. But, I wanted to see if I could do this on a “free as in beer” distribution, so I went with OpenSUSE.
Unlike Kubuntu, with OpenSUSE I was able to quickly and easily grab the server components I needed to set the stage for Drupal. These were: MySQL 4.1.13, Apache 2.0.54, and PHP 4.4.0-6.
eWEEK.com Senior Editor Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols has been using and writing about operating systems since the late 80s and thinks he may just have learned something about them along the way. He can be reached at [email protected]