The Making of me.chschmid.com, Part 4: The Operating System

With all components where they should be and the machine booting, installing an operating system (OS) was the next step. GNU/Linux was the obvious choice and all of my machines run on Ubuntu, so Ubuntu it is.

As the machine is intended to act as server, Ubuntu 12.04LTS would make sense, however as my Xeon Haswell CPU (E3-V1245V3) is relatively new, the Linux Kernel and drivers that come with 12.04 are not a perfect fit for the hardware. – So Ubuntu 13.10 it is.

It was as simple as this: Download the 13.10 server image from http://www.ubuntu.com/, put it on an USB drive using http://www.pendrivelinux.com/ (Windows) or the Startup Disk Creator (Linux). Restart the machine, enter the boot menu by pressing F12 and boot from the USB drive. The setup is quit intuitive. As I started with an empty SSD, all I had to do is select automatic installation using LVM on the empty hard drive. To start with I selected LAMP, OpenSSH and Samba as server roles.

The computer rebooted after the installation leaving me with a login prompt.

login

After login I installed all the stuff that I would need to also run the PC as desktop.

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get dist-upgrade
sudo apt-get install ubuntu-desktop vlc vainfo lm-sensors calibre texlive-full ipe audacity p7zip thunderbird eclipse wine git-core keepass2 gparted filezilla inkscape chromium-browser kile qjackctl virtualbox virtualbox-guest-additions-iso pavucontrol pulseaudio-module-jack joe rosegarden xdotool musescore dconf-tools openjdk-7-jdk libva-intel-vaapi-driver ufw gufw nautilus-open-terminal smartmontools gksu gimp build-essential devscripts debhelper javahelper

Finally reboot the machine and you should be greeted by a graphical user interface.

sudo shutdown -r now

6 thoughts on “The Making of me.chschmid.com, Part 4: The Operating System

  1. Karl

    so you run your own server at home, right? (me.chschmid.com)
    and also you run a server on a rental basis, right? (chschmid.com)

    my question is: how do you redirect from the sub-domain me.chschmid.com to the IP of your modem?
    Is your IP static or dynamic? Do you redirect all ports, or only the http port (80)?

    I would do nearly the same thing. Running ownCloud on my home-server, but use my public domain zeilhofer.co.at, which goes to a rented server from world4you.

    Reply
  2. Pingback: The Making of me.chschmid.com, Part 5: Server Configuration | Christian M. Schmid

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