So, you are facing a freshly installed copy of Linux. It has the basics, but nothing else. What do you install first?

I can answer that question because I just did it for the UML system you see here.

Here’s what I loaded …

• I have download most of my brain into Emacs macros, so working without emacs for any length of time is not acceptable. Fortunately, a quick ‘apt-get install emacs21’ and a working emacs system becomes available.
• After loading emacs, I grabbed the .emacs file (and all of its supporting libraries) from my desktop system.
• My overall plan for this UML system is to use it as my web host. That means that apache is required. Grabbing apache with apt-get was simple.
• I plan to base my web site around a Ruby based blogging package called Rublog. That means Ruby will be needed. Since I tend to track the latest version of Ruby a little more closely than Debian does, I normally install Ruby by hand from source. Fortunately, installing Ruby is trivial. I just downloaded the source (from www.ruby-lang.org), and did the standard configure/make/make install commands.
• Next I needed the Rublog software. I had been playing with Rublog on my laptop, so I had the configuration pretty well decided by that point. I just copied the laptop setup to the UML system.
• Finally, Rublog needs RDoc to render any RDoc postings. A quick visit to the Ruby Application Archive to grab RDoc and I was good to go.

And that completed my first phase of setups. I had to do a little reading on setting up iptables and a bit of configuration with apache. The result is what you see here.

So, what packages do you need to work with.