It sounds pretty obvious, but after you’ve gotten the machine installed
and flubbed around with it for a while (“Look, Mozilla is pretty cool!
Check out OpenOffice.org!”) the next thing to do is… figure out what
to do next. Everyone has their top priority… a print server, a file
server, a web server, a database server, an office workstation, a
kiosk, a router, a firewall. There a million different configurations
and permutations and combinations you can figure out for your new
machine. Pick one. Take your time and research it and configure it and
try it out. In the process you’ll learn lots about the command shells,
the security model, the different ways of packaging and installing
software. Here’s what I’ve tried so far:
- File sharing via Samba
- Data work with MySQL and MyODBC
- Static web pages with Apache
- Dynamic web pages with Twiki and Perl
- Visual FoxPro under Wine per Paul McNett
And, not all of these experiements have to occur on the Linux box
alone. My MySQL experiments used the Linuxbox as the database server
and VFP on a Windows laptop. One of the several Perl and Twiki
installations I’ve made was also on a Windows server, using the CygWin DLL to provide command-line equivalents for RCS functionality in Windows.