jcahn2 wrote on Tuesday, April 22, 2014:
Ahoy Dr Naha,
Using linux will be like your first beer - you will wonder how people love such a flavor. Persevere and it will quench your thirst.
One. Server vs desktop. In my humble opinion, after the original installation, a server should not have a monitor or keyboard (or mouse) attached to it - only the power cord and an ethernet cable. You will access the server only via a secure tunnel “ssh” or the web interface via browser. You will need to do some command line work to define your IP address and network settings. Here is an example (a bit of overkill):
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/NetworkConfigurationCommandLine/Automatic
Using desktop software for a server compromises security and encourages dangerous experimentation from well meaning know-it-alls like myself. It also wastes RAM on video graphics that could be used in caches etc that would improve server performance. Use a lightweight linux like Mint for the workstations. If you must view your file structure from a Windows machine, installing Samba on the server will allow you to see shared directories just like you are used to doing with Windows. You will also learn when you need to change to the super-user “root” and when you can operate as a less dangerous regular user. The switch back and forth is simple to learn.
Two. With a linux server, I encourage you to learn to talk to the server with the command line interface. It means learning a new language but is more powerful and faster than graphic programs. I sometime browse my server files with a simple graphic program midnight commander.
user@myserver:~$ sudo apt-get install mc
then typing “mc” will give a handy view of the file system. Use “sudo mc” when you want to run this as the superuser root and are ready to do some real damage :>)
Three. My favorite command line editor for php files is nano. When accessing by graphical interface I like bluefish. You will likely get several more opinions here - like religion.
Four. When you choose the ubuntu 14.04 server iso and boot from disk, it will promt you for most setup information that is needed to set up your LAMP ssh and samba server out of the box. Write down your passwords for the user and for mysql. Then you are ready for a flawless OpenEMR installation. The wiki instructions work (even for doctors like me).
When you are ready to be very dangerous, put webmin on your server.
Check back here often prn. Pimm and fsgl will find many helpful wiki entries from those who have gone before you. Bon voyage! Jack