Linux

In that case, who cares? Give em sudo and let them harden it themselves? LOL

Ok, I have a bit more time up my sleeve.

Redhat or Ubuntu for a LAMP web server? Spun up Ubuntu coz we had one already but RedHat seems like a more robust option. Thoughts?

Ubuntu have later versions of packages shipped out of the box whereas RedHat backport security patches and bug fixes to older versions.
So for example on RHEL 6 you will find PHP 5.3 which is EOLed by PHP a while ago but still supported by Red Hat. You will still get updates and patches from RedHat but your apps might not work/install and complain about old version of PHP for example. Latest Ubuntu Long Term Support (LTS) release (16.04) ships with PHP 7 out of the box whereas latest RedHat/Centos 7 comes with PHP 5.6.
Nothing is stopping you from installing the versions you want from some other package/software repositires on any distro you like but its best to stick with official ones as you will get security patches and bug fixes as soon as Canonical or RedHat release them. And you want these to come from the vendor and fast, not some third party.

So check what your apps need/support.

Apparently PHP7 is super fast.

You can get enterprise level support for both but RedHat have been doing it for a bit longer so thats probably why they come across a bit more "robust". I doubt you will need it to run a LAMP app though.

Oh and then there are differences between package managers ( apt vs yum), default firewall managers are different and some other things but if you haven't used any of them then it makes no difference and probably best to stick with what you have running already. People get too religious about these things.

Well the beauty of AWS is I spun up two of each. The downside is I'm VERY rusty with my nix and it took fucking ages to work out how to get Redhat talking to the RDS MySQL. The steaming piles of shit have been handed over to the 3rd parties now so they can bang their heads against a wall now.

Importbuddy scripts. What do they need to run?

These peeps are complaining their WordPress script doesn't run. Quick look at directory shows owner is them and group is Apache and they've set it to rwx for everything it seems.

Wtf else does it need? Need to get them off my back.

Fixed it btw. Thanks for nothing you useless linux fuckers.

SELinux has a lovely set of 'extra' permissions that no motherfucker seems to mention..

#SELinux serve files off Apache, resursive
sudo chcon -t httpd_sys_content_t /data/www/html/sites/mysite -R

#Allow write only to specific dirs
sudo chcon -t httpd_sys_rw_content_t /data/www/html/sites/mysite/logs -R
sudo chcon -t httpd_sys_rw_content_t /data/www/html/sites/mysite/uploads -R

https://blog.lysender.com/2015/07/centos-7-selinux-php-apache-cannot-writeaccess-file-no-matter-what/

Well that was fun.

Web application with probably 250,000 lines of perl that's been running on CentOS 5 for well over 5 years. Just got it and the ~200 CPAN modules it requires up and running on CentOS 7.

Response times instantly halved. Not sure yet whether that's perl 5.8 → 5.16, kernel 2.6.18 → 3.10.0, mongodb 2.6 → 3.2 or what but I'll take it.

I've installed a VM of Mint 18 using VirtualBox on a macbook pro. I'm aware that Vbox is less-than-awesome when it comes to performance but it is free...
The thing is, it runs rather slowly. I've installed guest additions, run sudo apt-get update && upgrade / dist-upgrade and allocated it more resources than it really needs (inc. 3d acceleration etc). The laptop is a quad i7 with 16GB ram, SSD with no other applications running in OS X.

I've deleted all unnecessary applications from Mint so it's only using 5GB. System requirements are 9GB and I've given it 16.

Is there anything I can do to smooth the performance? Windows are slow to respond, Firefox is borderline un-useable.

It's just for playing around with the command line really but I've run Ubuntu in the past in the same manner and it ran perfectly. Picked Mint because it seemed lighter...

If you're just doing command line stuff kill X - that must be quicker.

Or, I think Mint has a version running XFCE (or some other light weight) desktop manager - perhaps try that?

So just boot directly in to the command line? I'd rather have the GUI just to make life easier/have a fallback.

Yeah, that's essentially what I was suggesting (or try a version with a lighter window manager).

Hmm. I might try installing it to a fast sd card depending on the speed of the internal card reader.

That is not a good idea.

Just kill X and use a stripped down window manager (if you need to at all).

Even better... ssh into it.

It depends why you have a VM, what you need Linux for... but if it's command line stuff, dump the GUI.

I'm just using it for curiosity's sake and to be more apt at using the command line on the raspberry pi without having to constantly be googling stuff.

Would like to get comfortable fiddling with network stuff and SSH etc.

I'm still confused about what X is if you say I should kill it and use a stripped down window manager... I thought it just meant booting in to the console as per this:
http://ubuntuhandbook.org/index.php/2014/01/boot-into-text-console-ubuntu-linux-14-04/

using the command line on the raspberry pi

Why not just ssh onto the pi & play there?

Copy your current build onto a second SD card, and the if you mess up, restoring is just a question of swapping cards.

Mint and Ubuntu seek to be full desktop replacements, the equivalent of OSX or Windows 10.

Try Xubuntu instead.

The difference between the vast majority of Linuxs:

1. RPM vs DEB for packages
   
2. Window managers
   
   

Xubuntu is 95% Ubuntu, except they ditched the animation and graphics heavy front-end for a lightweight one instead called XFCE.

https://xubuntu.org/

You don't have to concern yourself with much of this if you don't know what X is, etc... that's cool, but there are more lightweight UIs that will be more comfortable in a VM.

https://xubuntu.org/tour/
http://xfce.org/

I've currently got it running as a headless mumble server with the SSH port closed so it's pretty much locked down. It just seems more convenient to play around with this stuff on a VM as well.

Cool, that's really handy. I'll download that later and have a play.

Bit different, but you could try running an emulated pi in qemu

Nice! I think a quick and dirty VM might be easier though.

I replaced cinnamon with mate and now it runs much better!

I'm stuck trying to get SSH to work between a VM host and guest.

Installed SSH in the guest OS (Xubuntu) and got it running. Changed the Virtualbox network settings to Bridged adaptor and have checked whoami;hostname.

In the OS X terminal, when I try ssh username@hostname it cant find anything.

Also tried ifconfig in the guest and tried the ip address to no avail.

Any ideas? Trying to get comfortable with it before setting it up on a Pi.
Would also like to set up key-based log-in for SSH instead of passwords.

Ok, I've managed to figure out it was actually ssh hostname@guest_ipaddress from OS X.
This then asks for a password but my guest OS password doesn't work for some reason.

ssh username@address

where address can be an IP address or a resolvable hostname

you can also do ssh -l username address

add a -v for loads of diagnostics and it's always worth checking you can ping the address if you're not sure if you've set up bridging properly

I did it!

Was being daft and using hostname@ipaddr instead of username.
Cheers!

Probably good practice to change the port from the default 22 right?