Richard Owlett wrote: > Andrei POPESCU wrote: > >Richard Owlett wrote: > >>Can someone point me to detailed instructions on setting up a client > >>and "server" on a single physical computer. As a primary motivation > >>for this whole project is learning Linux, I foresee lots of related > >>reading :) > > > >Most (if not all) client/server software works fine on a single machine. > >If your goal is to create more complex environments that your probably > >want virtual machines (KVM, VirtualBox, Xen, etc.) > > You first sentence indicates I may know even less than I thought I > might. > > To verify we are talking about the same thing: > I'm envisioning a Debian repository on the "server". > I will then use netinst to install Debian on the "client".
Use of the word "server" and "client" is difficult because there are so many meanings associated with it. A hardware computer. A software program running on a computer. The side of a communication protocol. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Server_(computing) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Client_(computing) When you asked your questions about installing onto a system I think the common assumption would be that you meant you had a physical hardware computer system and would be installing a Debian system upon it. It may be to a different partition on the disk so as to preserve other systems but only booting one at a time. In other words, it isn't possible to install on hardware using the same hardware as the source and the destination. Only one is running at a time. The installation to the detination would overwrite the source. If instead you already have a computer system running and you want to use that same computer system for running an instance of Debian such that you end up with *both* your currently running system *and* a newly created Debian system running on the same hardware _then_ the solution you need is a virtual machine running on your present system. (As was suggested by Andrei.) Because you would be wanting to simulate more than one computer system on the same physical hardware. One would be the host system. One or more would be vitual systems running upon it. In that case you would want to create a virtual machine that will act as your client. Then you can install upon your client virtual machine using your host machine as the server. That is certainly possible. People do it all of the time. What is your host machine operating system? Hopefully it will be Debian. After all this is the debian-user mailing list. (smile) But from a technical standpoint it could be any of a variety of host operating systems. Some will be easier to work with than others. You would need to set up a virtual machine upon it and then use it as your test client. > Later a browser running on the "client" will be able to access an > HTML page on the "server" or connect to a page on the WWW via > dial-up. > > Recommended client/server software for a newbie? This is a somewhat scary question to answer. Scary because it is really quite a simple thing to set up a web server and to browse it using a web browser. Surely you are already using a web browser. Making it very confusing that you would even need to ask about a web browser. Just use whatever web browser you are normally using. The hard part is setting up a virtual machine, configuring the network and networking bridge, installing an operating system on it. In this the task and mighty labor lies. But to answer your question the most popular web server is Apache with a variety of improved higher performance followers such as Nginx or Lighttpd. And for a web browser Firefox and Chromium are probably in the lead with others such as Epiphany, Konqueror, Midori in the pack behind them. And there are text console web browsers such as lynx, w3m, elinks which are very useful too. Bob
signature.asc
Description: Digital signature
