Building a development environment

Written byBy: Mario Rimann.

The idea

Use the vacation week for some easy work on the Seminar Manager (bugifixing, development) and also some customer-work.

The battle plan

Developing on Windows Vista is uncool (no symlinks possible - would cause many copy-paste steps for local testing - I don't like that way), so Kerstin offered her HP notebook that is running Ubuntu Linux.

What really happened

Installing Apache, MySQL, GDLib, ImageMagick and Eclipse on bunti-bunti (the hostname of Kerstin's notebook) worked out well. Installing TYPO3 on the local webserver succeeded without problems.

But starting Eclipse to install PHPEclipse and Subclipse led us to a serious issue: the notebook has only 512MB of RAM - which is sufficient for surfing the web and answering emails. But not for running the webserver and Eclipse and some other tools alltogether (notebook hung completely in the I-swap-myself-away-status).

We decided to organize some additional memory for her notebook. No problem (I thought) - there is a Media Markt on the other side of the hill - 40min by car.  The only problem could be that no one of us speaks Italian - and many of the salesmen don't speak German. On monday we went to the store. After searching the whole it-compartment we did not find any memory. As next we asked salesman A and he told us to go to the customer service. There, salesman B told us to ask in the IT compartment of the store and pointed us to another salesman. Salesman C sent us to another salesman in the IT compartment. While waiting, salesman A came back to us (we told our story a second time) and he asked salesman D. Together with us, he searched the article database and found a matching product that also was in stock. But that article is available at the customer service point only. Salesman A brought us there - and oh wonder - he brought us to another customer service, which is located outside the store itself (strange, huh?). After all, we got our memory and went home.

After installing the additional memory, bunti-bunti didn't start up anymore and some weird graphical error on the BIOS-POST screen appeared. After removing the memory module, everything was fine. After re-installing the memory module, notebook was broken again. F*ck!

So working on bunti-bunti was impossible. And Kerstin decided to rename her notebook from bunti-bunti to "oma-waltraud" (grandma "waltraud") because it's old and slow :-) Is this a fingertip and she wants to tell me to buy her a new notebook?

Next step was to try working on Vista even if it is not cool. But after having some trouble with the whole notebook, apache didn't work at all.

The result

After failing with all the equipment I've taken with me, I decided to enjoy this vacation without work. So far, this is a great decision!

And I even learned some points from this story:

• When you have to work on another system as your well-known-everyday-equipment, set it up before (!) going on vacation
• After setting up your on-the-road-equipment, test it!
• If you need spareparts for your computer - go to a real computer shop that sells you real memory, no cheap no-name crap
• Decide to relax during vacation - it feels great :-)  (and reading emails or chatting with friends is not working - isn't it?)