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Its been about almost more then two years since I have been playing with CentOS on many different platforms etc. Its very stable but on the other hand, PHP/MySQL updates are very hard to get and still PHP is 5.1.6. I tried EPEL repo and it updated PHP to 5.3.1 but still there were conflicts with stuff and many core packages.

So, I thought why not move to Ubuntu since it has just announced 10.04LTS (Long Term Support) in April 2010. Folks at iWeb were really nice to do a reinstall without any charges and also process a memory upgrade request at an amazing 50% discount.

Ubuntu 10.04 LTS

• Apache 2 version is 2.2.14
• PHP version is 5.3.2
• MySQL version is 5.1.41-3ubuntu12
• SVN (Subversion) version is 1.6.6

As a comparison CentOS 5.4 has the following versions

• Apache 2 version is 2.2.3
• PHP version is 5.1.6
• MySQL version is 5.0.77
• SVN (Subversion) version is 1.4.2

So if you are a PHP developer looking to deploy a Linux flavour on your new box, choose Ubuntu

I have seen people installing Apache, PHP and MySQL from source code on a production server. You should NEVER, NEVER, NEVER install these packages from source on an RPM or DEB based Linux distributions. Did I say “NEVER” enough times to make your realize that it is not a good practice?

Installing from source is bad idea; there are many reasons for this but the major one is that you will be spending a lot of time keeping the system updated. If you love installing from source then I would suggest using a different distribution e.g. Gentoo.

You can build from source if the package is not available in yum but still, try to use “yum” (or “apt-get” on Ubuntu) because it will save a lot of your time when upgrading your packages.

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phpMyAdmin is a very common and handy tool that most of the developers use. It is available on almost every server.

Installing phpMyAdmin on Ubuntu server is even easier, you just need to

sudo apt-get install phpmyadmin

but what if we accidently skip the configuration screen where phpmyadmin makes modifications to apache?

Dont worry just do the following

Edit Apache’s configuration file (assuming you are using apache2)

sudo nano /etc/apache2/apache2.conf
# better to use the following command instead of the one above
#gksudo gedit /etc/apache2/apache2.conf

Add the following line of code inside apache2.conf:

Include /etc/phpmyadmin/apache.conf

Now restart Apache:

sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart

Go to /phpmyadmin/ and login with your mysql username and password.

WARNING: Please use this method to install Apache, PHP and MySQL because its more suitable for most of your needs and has options to auto-upgrade your installation. The following method is obsolete and not recommended.

After trying to install Apache, MySQL and PHP on Ubuntu 8.10 via several methods listed over the web. I opted for xampp package for linux.

It is as easy as ABC

Download the xampp linux package from their official website

wget http://nchc.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/xampp/xampp-linux-1.7.tar.gz

(I have selected NCHC, Taiwan as the mirror to download this package, you may try another)

Extract the files

sudo tar xvfz xampp-linux-1.7.tar.gz -C /opt

Chmod the files to have nobody ownership

sudo chown -R nobody:root /opt/lampp/

Configure xampp security

sudo /opt/lampp/lampp security

Start xampp with this command

sudo /opt/lampp/lampp start

Stop xampp

sudo /opt/lampp/lampp stop

Restart xampp

sudo /opt/lampp/lampp restart

Login to ftp using the username nobody and the password that you have set up in the “xampp security”

To uninstall xampp

sudo rm -fr /opt/lampp

Enjoy!!