Lyceum : the day after

Far from crowded, our first publicly announced Lyceum overflowed with rewarding experiences.

First, attendees were eager learners. A "teacher" (I prefer "guide" or "moderator") is most motivated when the audience includes motivated learners. The Lyceum audience, without exception, had insightful inquiries and observations. The verbal contributions made our learning environment a wonderful experience.

No one lacked opportunity to learn. I was the appointed guide, but I was guided no less than any other participant. We elected installation of Drupal with MySQL 5 and PHP 5. All of the target hosts were previously appointed with earlier versions of at least one component service; a near certainty of server upgrades is broken service features and none of our upgrades were exceptional. The installation of Drupal is far from trivial, and my experience with several earlier installations only exploits a fraction of Drupal front-end functionality and the supporting back-end services.

Servers, not upgraded, installed smoothly. We were all using hosts with Ubuntu-supported installations. The apt-cache and apt-get utilities are tremendously helpful for installing Debian-approved packages. The approved packages include apache2, php5, libapache2-mod-php5, php5-gd, mysql-server-5.0, php5-mysql; many, many packages are needed. I should warn: however easy the installation (or upgrade) seems, impacts on pre-existing services may not be discovered for many days or weeks (or months).

The installation of Drupal 5 will be ultimately remembered as straight-forward. The Drupal development teams maintain marvelous documentation. Follow instructions carefully, and have fond memories of installing Drupal 5. Shortcuts result in some time researching procedural omissions.