Part 1: Drupal 6.2 and DB2 Express-C 9.5 on Ubuntu 7.10

Finally! It's been far too long since I've had an interesting project to work on. With a couple of sites I might have to make in the foreseeable future, it's time to investigate what I can do with stuff available today. There's a couple of reasons I've hit upon Drupal 6.2 and DB2 Express-C 9.5:

• Silicon Valley Lab had it's inaugural meeting of the SVL Linux Users Group this morning. I recognize that this is extremely nerdy, and even nerdier to be so excited about it. But the turnout for the SVLLUG's first, unstructured, sort of planning event was about 50 people. Now, to put this in perspective, at any one point in time, I've had about five friends interested in Linux. 50? All of which who are guaranteed to be on campus eight hours a day, five days a week? I'm certainly going to take advantage of it!


• Seriously, I work for DB2. If I can't get this database to work with Drupal, I will pester people until I have it working, and then I'll blog about it.


• With MySQL drifting away from open source (come back MySQL! Come back!), I don't see a whole lot of reason to use it. MySQL doesn't exactly have the most cutting edge features (native XML support), and if it's free in the same sense as DB2, why not? IBM has always supported Drupal (15 part series!)


• I recently read an article comparing Django and Drupal. I've used Drupal for a couple of web sites in the past, and been happy overall. The problem always ended up being with 3rd party modules, but I'd rather have an architecturally sound framework than something flashy that won't last.
  

Anyway, first thing's first:

1. Download DB2 Express-C V9.5 for Ubuntu: it's as easy as `sudo apt-get install db2exc`, but you can find more information on Ubuntu's DB2 Virtual Appliance Page


2. Download Drupal 6.2


3. Install Apache httpd with PHP support


4. Install DB2 driver for PHP
   

Ok, in the time it took to write that post, DB2 Express-C has downloaded and installed. Time to start playing; next post will be how to do steps 3 and 4.