Diving into FOSS

Today I installed my vagrant environment for Wikipedia, which is a nice break from all the LAMP headache.

My biggest lesson learn for the week can be summarized in one command.

sudo apachectl stop

In the Mac OS, you cannot host sites on the same apache port. I learn this the hard way, since I had MAMP and XAMPP installed on my system (not to mention mac also have its own apache already installed). This was a huge mess. I had to reset and uninstall everything.

In the end, I chose XAMPP because of its good support for Wordpress and Drupal. I first tried Lynda’s tutorial Up running with Linux for Php Developers, which is a waste of time, since the Turnkey LAMP distro already have all the configuration ready. (I could have saved 4 hours of my life instead of manually configuration all the packages through Virtualbox).

I currently have two virtual machines: one with Turnkey LAMP stack, which already configures all the nitty gritty part of server OS for me.

Another is GNOME JHBuild Fedora 20, which is preinstalled with JHBuild for sending in patches on bugzilla.

This tutorial helps a bunch, since it breaks down all the “AMP” stack for Windows and Macs, and also have options on customization:

Installing Apache, MySQL, and PHP

I will be busy for the next month writing proposals and submitting bugs for an application.

I think my biggest goal for the upcoming year is to work on as many project as possible, and three specific ones are on my top three list. FOSS and open source contribution is a huge factor in the admission requirement. The stack and language itself is not so important, as to mentorship and organizations.