I fiddled around with the system some more today. I’m still loving it.

I realized that the basic install didn’t give me mysql or apache.

A couple google searches pointed me to the Ubuntu Packages web site. It really, truly only took a few minutes to install devhelp, mysql, subversion, apache (w/ mod_php and mod_per), eclipse and a whole bunch of other things I use. I just needed to:

sudo apt-get install <package-name>

And not one dependency error in the bunch. I was told which packages would be added, updated, or deleted. One package, another IDE, needed to be deleted in order to install Eclipse. It was so very easy. The only thing I had to search for was the package name to use for mod_perl. It’s libapache2-mod-perl2. Once I found that, I was good to go.

I even intalled a few games I’ve never played before.

Why didn’t I do this earlier?

With Fedora, I would have already dropped to using tarballs of source code, make, make test, and make install. (Scribus, for example – rpm dependency hell, IIRC– just install from source on Fedora.) Not that I don’t mind installing from source, but the fact that I don’t have to is a testament to the distribution. Nice.