btw, for normal hosting, www.webfaction.com is excellent

I have two sites running on heroku right now. Getting the database setup is a bit of work, but it's not too difficult. You basically have to host the database on AWS. You have to export the db save, upload it to an AWS bin, then change the login information.

Now that I"m used to working with heroku, I love it.

To help with possible confusion: The one free dyno is sort of scary. All that means is that there is one dyno that rests, so if there hasn't been a visitor to the site in a while, the page load will be sloooow. Like 20 seconds, if I recall the speed test correctly. Once there's action, the sites loads super fast. My sites show being in the top 3% fastest in the world. If you don't like the idea of a resting dyno, then buy an extra one, but for my purposes, I don't care too much. When I was on the front page of HN, I recieved about 5,000 views in one hour, and there was no trottling and I did not receive any emails about the spike.

The Git+ command line is very simple and intuitive to use as well, after a bit of getting used to. Trust me, it beats the hell out of using FTP (which I never understood) or using Explorer (not IE but Windows Explorer).

In my opinion, heroku is well worth it.

As for getting WP or Drupal on it. I know that Drupal can be backended with PostgreSQL and idk about WP. Heroku does not offer free MySQL, and I'm pretty sure they don't offer any MySQL at all, but you'd have to check that. And there is also a 10,000 tuple limit on the free db, though you can get 1 million tuples for $10 (I think that's right, please check).

I tried to toss a Drupal site onto Appfog but there was some issue connecting to the database. You point-and-click to install Drupal PHP + MySQL, but I don't know what happened that I couldn't get the credentials to work. Basically, I uploaded a PHP file up to the site which displays the creds then I had to change the files in the program. I really don't know what happened that Drupal couldn't talk to MySQL. I haven't been in the mood to look into the issue.

I think the idea with no persistent database is the same with heroku. Heroku doesn't store the database on their local servers. Pretty sure AppFog works about the same, but their documentation is awful. Heroku docs are pretty labyrinthine, but at least you can find the information if you use Google.

They use a Ruby command prompt, which works similar to heroku.

I'm gonna go ahead and use LXDE. Razor-QT looks pretty nice and all, but there's no default packages for it on Arch, so I'd have to download it to a file system, with a browser, unpack, run development mode, create...

Anyways, QT looks like too much work and probably would be much easier after having some other desktop installed, which is not cool, IMO. LXDE doesn't come with a browser, has openbox, and basically has different levels of installation, so customizing it should be very easy. Ultimately, I would have probably ended up here, so I'll skip the hard stuff and go here. I also don't have a clear idea of how the file tree looks and works, so that is something keeps me from using anything that involves devel-packaging.

Enlightenment actually looks kind of interesting, but I'd rather have something minimal to start with.

I have Xubuntu LTS on my work netbook. Works well enough for my needs, I'm not really powerusing the window manager anyways.

I run Kubuntu and love me some KDE so I'm interested to check out Razor-QT, hadn't heard of it before. I'd recommend KDE full desktop but seriously, try them all! that's mostly the point

Shoe: Debian stable is not what you want for up-to-date releases, it is for "about as sure as can be" stable - which obv takes time. If Gentoo didn't give you stupidly new releases, chances are you were using x86 and not ~x86 branch (see: http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/handboo...l?part=3&chap= ). I loved Gentoo but can't be doing with the compile time these days... maybe when I eventually get a new system

I'm pretty happy with LXDE so far. Perfect for a total newb like me!

I originally tried Kubuntu. It was beautiful to look at but sensory overload and at least for me, the UI was very confusing, but I'm a total UI idiot. I honestly believe that it would have taken me more time to customize that OS than it took me to install Arch. Installing Arch only takes a few hours.

LXDE is just two buttons on the bottom left: a start menu that goes to a few program lists & settings and a button that opens up the file directory. It's spartan, simple, and doesn't get in the way. There isn't one thing that made me search frantically for the uninstall program. It would have been a sad day if, after installing Arch, I ended up installing a bloated desktop as that would, as the Arch docs love to remind you: go against the Arch Way.

That's one thing about Arch. As I understand it, the program repositories for other OS's have several versions available for many of the programs. Arch is super-picky about using stable releases and the latest. For example, you can only install Clojure 1.4, Python 3.3, but I can't install Leiningen via its normal package system, so I have either pull it directly from git or use their AUR installers, neither of which is encouraging.

The fun just started. Have to learn how to use package builds and chmods or whatever.

Desktop:

I'm using LXDE too since I'm running it in a VM on a crappy machine, it runs pretty well.

@dave, I don't remember which branch but it's probably safe to say it was x86. The compile times were pretty bad yeah.

@daveT, Luckily with linux installing from source is almost always the same. Just configure it, make it, then make install it (with or without sudo depending on what it does).

Out of installing like 50 things over the past year I only came across 1 package that required doing something different than the above to install and it was some weird package that was likely made by some random dude and isn't very popular at all.

Once you get more comfy you might want to look into the zsh shell. It has some useful things.

Is working on an open source project a good way to get freelance work that isn't of the odesk/freelancer/elance variety (ie actually pays US market rates)? Seems like if you make a good contribution to a project and someone else managing/working on the project needs work related to it, it could lead to some opportunities. I'm not looking for freelance work at the moment, but in the future I might.

I do want to clarify this:

If I had ran the normal install script on AppFog, there'd be no worries. I have a Drupal site on my local machine w/ custom CSS and modules. This is where the hang-up is. I ported a setup like this to a shared host and there was no problems outside of some minor tweaking after it was uploaded.

Hopefully someone will take the dive and use generic installs and plugins. I can't imagine how a CMS would work w/o persistent databases. They have to be sitting in AWS somewhere or all the information would be lost at the slightest downtime, right?

The sudo not-sudo stuff isn't too difficult to grasp. I imagine any mistake I made was minor. Right now, I'm running Grub shell.

I have 75gigs HD + 1gig RAM allocated to the VM. It runs a little slow when switching between screen modes, but it's pretty fast overall. Kind of wish I allocated more RAM and and an extra processor to it though, but I suspect it wouldn't matter if I did.

The only irritating thing is that sometimes, the VM won't catch the internet, so I have to login as root and run a command to get it to work again.

As for installing files, wasn't there a quote a few pages back on the order of "Why can't everything be a .exe file?" That's sort of how I feel at the moment.

I still have to do that hw from 6.00. Are you going to post your exam answers in that thread or will you wait until the profs show theirs?

I was going to wait until the progress page is updated just to be safe. Hopefully we get our grades later today. The deadline for that one question just expired.

AppFog does have free persistent storage. Both MySQL and MongoDB (as well as all their other services... Redis, RabbitMQ, Memcached etc) are free, but with a storage limit.

Personally, I used MongoHQ, which gives you 2GB of free MongoDB storage.

having a strong portfolio of work on open source projects is a huge boon to your resume. it's definitely a vector for acquiring work, but based on your short post i suspect your expectations are unrealistic.

Wooster, so you can truly get 2G of RAM + 2G of MySql free? That seems really awesome, actually, and is more than enough to power most real-world applications that don't blow up in popularity.

AUR is just a repository of build/install scripts that anyone can contribute to. I like it because it really does make installing from source always the same. All you have to do is 'makepkg -s' and it resolves all the dependencies, downloads the source (supports pretty much all revision control systems), then configures/compiles the source into a package which you install with pacman. Since it's handled by the package manager it makes it easier to uninstall as well.

I've yet to find any open source software that didn't have an install script in AUR. I've seen a few that were broken/out of date/written incorrectly... but they're fairly obscure libraries and the PKGBUILD script was easy enough to fix anyway if you have some clue what you're doing.

Haha don't have specific preconceptions/expectations that it will lead to something, and may work on some open source anyway for the experience. But I take it that you're saying that it has a lot of benefits for both resume and skill, but don't expect too much in the particular department of leading directly to freelance work?

Not sure about MySQL, but on MongoHQ it's (I think 2GB), but it's an external service which appfog just integrate with. They also offer an AppFog hosted MongoDB service, but not sure how much free space you get (but you def get free space).

In my personal experience, I have had no issues with appfog, and I have several small nodejs apps backed by mongodb hosted there at zero cost.

Regarding Wordpress, not read it but just saw this come up on their blog http://blog.appfog.com/how-to-make-w...appfog-part-1/

Too late to edit my above post, but digging around on the AppFog website revealed the following:

You only get 100MB of MySQL storage with the AppFog hosted database (source http://www.appfog.com/products/appfog/pricing/)

The MongoHQ database which I use only comes with 512MB, not 2GB as I stated earlier... the 2GB is one step up from their free plan.

Apologies for the confusion

A half a gig is still a lot for storing text. If you had documents that were all about 20kb in size you could store over 25,000 documents.

Ye, its still ample for my needs. Worth noting tho that with AppFog, the jump from the free to paid plan is $100/month which is pretty huge.

so there is no way to get more database space with jumping to the 100 tier?

also i suppose you could just use you own remote database? what are the performance concerns for using a database which is not on the same machine or LAN as your application server?

Personally, I would recommend using external services.

Performance concerns are not really a big issue. For me, AppFog and MongoHQ both allow you to choose which cloud service and region you want to use (e.g. AWS US-east), so your app and db are hosted in the same datacenter and on the same network, making it just as fast as having your own LAN.

Obviously not all services/regions are available, so you need to do a bit of homework before choosing a service, but in general, they seem to work really well together.

thanks for the link

they recommend running 5 wordpress instances at 384mb each to consume the full 2gb

but why would you need/want 5 instances of your blog being served up? i dont get it? does appfog do the load balance across the 5 instances internally?

why not set up 1 instance at 2gb?

well i just posted a comment there so lets see what they say

Yes, its for load balancing, if you run 5 instances, it will load balance across all 5. I am getting out of my depth here, but I assume there is a sweet spot for the max number of requests per second, which AppFog reckon is 5@384MB.

correct.