A very handy command to see the total size of a directory on a Unix-based computer.

du -sh *

This will show the total size of files and directories in your current working directory. The s flag means to show a summary–which basically just shows the top level directory only, instead of the contents of each and every folder down the file system hierarchy. The h flag shows a human readable file size.

For my home directory, I get the following output:

404M    Desktop
 30G    Documents
6.0G    Library
 32G    Movies
 18G    Music
 11G    Pictures
2.7G    Projects
 16K    Public
166M    Sites

I’ve made a brand new spare PC that I’m hoping my parents can use in their spare room/study. I refuse to install Windows, but as everyone knows, I’m a keen Ubuntu fan.

My younger brother donated me his “old” ATI Radeon X800 GTO graphics card to use in it (I want to eventually get XGL + Compiz set-up on it for all the neat eye candy). Thing is, Ubuntu and the card don’t play nice straight away. Here’s how I got them to dance.

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This howto assumes you’ve already followed my Building Apache 2.2 from source article.

Now we’re going to install Subversion 1.4.0 from source so that it can be access via Apache with authentication.

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Two reasons you might want to do this.

1. You want to host a Rails application using Mongrel via Apache and mod_proxy_balancer.
2. You’re studying in a Website administration module for your 3rd year Software Engineering degree :)

Seriously though, if you don’t want to use mod_proxy_balancer, just do a normal apt-get install of Apache 2 and you’ll be fine. mod_proxy_balancer is only available for Apache 2.2, and currently, that’s not available from the Ubuntu repositories via apt-get.

This article only covers installing Apache 2.2 – I’ll write another one for getting Subversion and PHP working shortly afterwards.

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It’s finally here, my updated how-to on how to get Ubuntu Dapper up and running as a home web server. Perfect for hosting those small web sites and blogs. My original Ubuntu 5.10 web server how-to is still available.

This updated version is very similar to the 5.10 how-to, however, there are a few changes required. The following changes have been made:

• Setting up the Multiverse and Universe repositories
• The packages to install Ruby
• Setting a symbolic link for Ruby
• Updating rubygems
• Clearing the rubygems cache

Other than those, the rest of the how-to is the same as the Breezy how-to.

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