Getting Started
Any modern PC with 64MB or more RAM and a single hard drive will be more than adequate for developing your Web site using these tools. The examples in this series were run on a Linux PC with a Pentium 500E processor, 128MB RAM, and a 6GB UDMA drive. If you're not a Linux fan, these tools will also run on FreeBSD as well as commercial Unix offerings from Sun, HP, and SGI. They'll also run on Windows NT, but this series of articles does not cover installation and configuration in the Windows NT environment.
For the purpose of these articles, I am assuming that you have a good understanding of basic Linux/Unix concepts and commands, that you know how to download and decompress software from the Internet, and that you are familiar with at least one text editor.
You'll also need root access to the computer that you plan to use if you intend to configure your Web server to listen on port 80 (the default HTTP port) and if you decide to create separate users for each software component. In addition, you will need write access to various system directories, such as /usr/local, if you intend to do a standard installation of PostgreSQL.
Finally, you'll need to know the IP address of your computer, if you want to access your site from another computer on your local network or the Internet.
The examples in this article assume that user directories can be found at /home.
Downloading, configuring, and installing the software components will probably require about a day of your time.