Installed Linux, MySQL and Tomcat...

Going to do a small job for a friend of mine, but it has to be done using Java and a bunch of open source stuff. So a couple of days ago I took an old, dusty puter I had lying around in a corner, 333Mhz and 256MB or RAM and started to install Red Hat 9. 2-3 hours later I had everything I needed in the box. The Red Hat install was very smooth and found all the old stuff I had in the machine. DHCP configuration and everything worked at once.

The worst problem was getting the correct Java SDK downloaded and installed, then configure Tomcat and MySQL correctly. I still have to figure out how to autostart them... probably some weird config file or other in some strange user directory...

MySQL works pretty fine with the J/Connector driver. The manuals suck, but you shouldn't expect anything else from software you don't pay anything for. Thank God for Google and good friends to help you sort out all the strange stuff with MySQL and Tomcat. All in all, it runs pretty well on that old machine. We'll see what happens when I try to deploy the stuff I'm coding in JDeveloper on my Windows machine over to the Linux box. Things will probably not work at once, even though it's a J2EE appliation (did I hear anyone say "write once - deploy everywhere"? Yeah sure ;)