About Me

Hi :) My name is David Abbott and my nick is comprookie2000. This is my home test server for LAMP. I also do a podcast, link at the top.

This Server

The server on which this website is hosted is a home build PC with a gateway motherboard and 2-80gb ide hard drives, a Single Intel P-4 processor running at 2.26GHz, and has 768MB of RAM. It happily sits in my closet, on the end of an ADSL line. I decided to use it to learn some web technologies, and it is running Gentoo since April 2002.

LAMP

The acronym LAMP refers to a solution stack of software, usually free and open source software, used to run dynamic Web sites or servers. The original expansion is as follows:

• Linux, referring to the operating system;
• Apache, the Web server;
• MySQL, the database management system (or database server);
• PHP or others, i.e. Perl, Python, the programming languages.

The combination of these technologies is used primarily to define a web server infrastructure, define a programming paradigm of developing software, and establish a software distribution package.

Though the originators of these open source programs did not design them all to work specifically with each other, the combination has become popular because of its low acquisition cost and because of the ubiquity of its components (which come bundled with most current Linux distributions). When used in combination they represent a solution stack of technologies that support application servers.

My Linux Distro of choice is Gentoo.

Gentoo

Gentoo is a free operating system based on either Linux or FreeBSD that can be automatically optimized and customized for just about any application or need. Extreme configurability, performance and a top-notch user and developer community are all hallmarks of the Gentoo experience.

Thanks to a technology called Portage, Gentoo can become an ideal secure server, development workstation, professional desktop, gaming system, embedded solution or something else -- whatever you need it to be. Because of its near-unlimited adaptability, we call Gentoo a metadistribution.

Of course, Gentoo is more than just the software it provides. It is a community built around a distribution which is driven by more than 300 developers and thousands of users. The distribution project provides the means for the users to enjoy Gentoo: documentation, infrastructure (mailinglists, site, forums ...), release engineering, software porting, quality assurance, security followup, hardening and more.

To advise on and help with Gentoo's global development, a 7-member council is elected on a yearly basis which decides on global issues, policies and advancements in the Gentoo project.