Frets on Fire server on Ubuntu

I've been having a blast lately playing Frets on Fire, the el-cheapo PC Guitar Hero clone. My ex pointed out that it has a Frets on Fire server as well which allows us to upload our top scores so we can verse each other to see who plays better over time. The Frets on Fire server has all these following pre-requisites:

• Python 2.4 or newer
• Django 0.96 or newer
• MySQL Server 4.0 or newer
• Apache web server (or any other web server)
• Apache mod_python
• Python Imaging
• Python MySQLdb
  

So I put aside most of saturday afternoon & evening to install all this on my computer and get the server running. Remembering the 'fun' I had installing the LAMP stack on my old Fedora box back two years ago, I knew this would easily take a long time.

Two hours later I had finally managed to get 5 stars on Kaiser chief's Ruby and blew away my old score. Hang on, what happened to installing the FoF server? Yeah, I did that already. That took me less than 30mins. Yes you heard me right, I installed that entire stack and the FoF server in 30mins and most of that was the download and waiting for install.

In fact, its as simple as this:

• sudo apt-get install apache2 libapache-mod-python
• sudo apt-get install mysql-server python-mysqldb
• sudo apt-get install python-imaging
• sudo apt-get install python-django
• Follow some very basic commands in the FoF server read-me such as copying and filling in the blanks in files.

It was so easy, it was so simple to get the application to do what I wanted to achieve, rather than just fiddle with install and configuring. It was so quick and easy that it didn't feel like I was working in Linux at all. It was so easy it could have been Windows for all I knew.

What happened to Linux? What happened to the days of mind-bogglingly painful installs? Of rpm-dependency hell. Of dredging web forums trying to understand what a particular error code meant? Of the little victories as you get each component to recognize the other component.

Of course, this was one small app, theres still plenty of other horrifying applications we can try installing, but even that is getting easier by the day. Its clear that Open Source programmers are realizing that making things easier for noobies is the best way to convert us over. We like to spend more time working with the application, rather than knowing all the intricate configurations.

Anyway, I need to get back to some Killing In the Name of...