Linux

Gitting Started with Git – Quick and Dirty

Gitting Started with Git – Quick and Dirty

I’m sure you guys have heard about Git. It’s been making a lot of waves lately. It seems that I’m always the last to jump on the bandwagon when it comes to things like that, but I’m finally here. Introduction There are tons of Version Control Systems (VCS) out there: Source Safe (Microsoft’s Baby, which sucks by the way), CVS, and SVN. Git is different from those in one major way: It’s a distributed system as opposed to a centralized one.

A Bit On Open Source And Some Baz Background

This has always been a touchy subject, especially in larger computer firms. But first, let me tell you how I got into Open Source. I started coding in Turbo Pascal 7.0, in about 1996 when I was in Grammar School. I took Turbo Pascal more as an introduction to Programming, instead of a product to do something constructive in.

After Pascal, I was looking into something visual. Hence, I fell into Visual Basic 5.0. Yeah, I know, I’m sorry.

Now this was my first step towards the open source community. I must admit, that I downloaded a pirated copy and ran with it for a while. Now, that was all well and good when I was sitting home playing around with stuff. But when it came to actually, to producing something for a market, you can’t (or should I say, shouldn’t) do that with pirated software.

After that, I got into web development. For this, there was a plethora of free tools available, for use. So I did that for a while. When I got back to college, I got into C++ (using Visual Studio, but still essentially free). That was a step in the right direction. However, as the semesters went on, we got more into using the .NET library. However, for my web development I never got into ASP.

The First Real Plunge into Open Source - Enter PHP

Bit by bit, web development gave way to web programming. This is where PHP came in. I got more familiar with PHP when I started working on different projects for clients. I chose PHP for a few main reasons:

  1. Free Documentation: I could learn almost everything I needed through online documentation.
  2. Cost: My first problem was hosting. ASP hosts used to be almost twice as expensive as their Linux counterparts.

The Open Source Misconception

One of the problems that people have with Open Source is that they think that it’s unsupported. People seem to think that open source software is written by a bunch of kids in basements or something. This is not the case, by any means.  For example, a lot of the Linux distributions are totally free and totally supported.  Wake up people; free doesn’t mean unsupported. The whole “You get what you pay for” isn’t always true.

Installing A LAMP Web Server System With Fedora Core 6

LAMP - Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP. These are the elements you will need to start a very robust and reliable web server from the ground up. HowToForge has a brilliant tutorial on how to start everything. Now take note, this is a VERY detailed tutorial. You can’t really go wrong with this tutorial. We got step by step instructions, we go screen shots, we got it all. The Linux platform used is Fedora Core 6.