As many people know, from my postings on twitter recently I have been having an issue getting my web server setup with linux, more specifically trac and svn under linux. For the past year I have had the same server running Windows 2000 and Apache as my trac/svn and testing server and I needed to get everything on linux, but I’ve had more problems than I originally thought I would have to deal with.

In the past three days, I think I’ve spent more time working in the linux command line than all the other times combined. It has been my goal for awhile to get my servers all running linux here too, but big problem was always Trac and SVN. I knew it would be a pain, but since I was on spring break this week I decided that this was the time to do it.

Setting up a LAMP server is no big deal, I’ve done it several times. I’m at the point where I can fly through the intsall in no time. The big problem I had was getting trac and svn setup and then moved over with everything intact.

On Friday night, after some searching Google for tutorials on moving Trac and SVN, I found Subversion + Trac for Multiple Projects (One Click Build) by Anant Garg. This really saved me. It was a great tutorial that went through every step line by line. It might have taken me a couple of times to figure it out, but eventually I got the whole thing setup and moved over to a virtual machine. This was my backup. I knew once I had the virtual machine setup and everything was working that I’d be able to get it moved back to the web server once I had linux on it.

This is where the real problems started. I’ve never had as many problems getting an operating system installed in my life. At first it wouldn’t even go to the installer. It kept dropping back to BusyBox (I think it’s a lack of RAM). Eventually, after about 25 tries, I got it to go through the installer. When it restarted it went back to BusyBox. The stuff I read online about getting past BusyBox didn’t work, I couldn’t even install the alternate version of Ubuntu. I finally gave up last night at 11:30 and walked away. This morning when I went to retrieve my keyboard I noticed that it was still looping through the BusyBox cycle. I typed ‘exit’, and it quit BusyBox and booted into the OS. I couldn’t beleive it. After all that all I had to do was type ‘exit’. I later found out that you have to wait for 3 or 4 minutes after it boots up to quit BusyBox (again, I think more RAM would fix the problem).

Once I got the server all setup and running, I had a small problem moving everything back over, but once I figured out that I had to change a path in one of the configuration files I was up and running.

This install is even more usefull than the previous one. I’m really liking it.