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I'm going to be getting a new system next week. I'm finally going to take the leap and run Linux as the native OS on it.

Seems like a standard install of Ubuntu is the way to go for a newbie. I'm planning on 10.04 LTS. Is there anything that I should change right away that will cause me problems down the road?

I'll be using this system for web development, mainly programming PHP. I'll be using my old laptop for testing with IE and Safari, at least until I either use Wine or VirtualBox to run them on the new machine.

I think I'm going to force myself to learn Vim while I'm at it.

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  • You can use simply Eclipse or Netbeans. Good (awesome? ;P) IDE written in Java, good for PHP development. I use them always. Other things. About Ubuntu. If you encounter graphic problems, try Fedora. Since they ship with newer graphic drivers, that might solve your problem. (There is a new release ahead)
    – Apache
    May 9, 2010 at 17:27
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    see also the various must-have Linux questions already on Super User. i have to say, this question seems better suited to a discussion forum like the Ubuntu forums.
    – quack quixote
    May 9, 2010 at 19:43

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If you have a graphics card for which the manufacturer provides drivers, get them. Ubuntu will usually inform you of this.

I always setup a firewall, depending on what you're doing, you might not need to. Depending on your level of experience I recommend guarddog (new to firewalls), or shorewall (comfortable with firewalls).

If your going to develop using a mysql database, take a look at a question I posted a few days ago - Disable MySQL startup in Ubuntu 10.04

Knowing vi is good, mainly for scenarios where everything is unavailable, when the system is not booting properly. I would not advise developing in it!

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  • Guarddog says it requires KDE. I'm probably going to start with Gnome unless I get good reasons not to. Is there a way to run Guarddog w/Gnome?
    – Cyrcle
    May 10, 2010 at 18:43
  • Synaptic Package Manger will install the just the KDE components it needs.
    – bryan
    May 10, 2010 at 18:57

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