LAMP how?
 

I'd like to start off by saying thank you to the many people that read these and willing to offer help and most importantly, HOPE.

I've used various Linux versions in the past and wind up getting frustrated and going back to Windows again and again.

One of the things that I'm most interested in is LAMP.

But the frustrating thing is trying to get the darn thing configured to where it will work.

I swear if I get Apache working I can't get MySQL or PHP to play right. or any combination of the above.

I've followed various how to's and never really had any luck.

I've tried and used Redhat, Fedora 7? Ubuntu, Suse 8,9,10 and 11 but never can get it to all play together nicley in the sand box.

I'm very interested in being able to create websites that are linked to a database and use the created website to pull reports from the db, and input data to it.

I've looked at Windows and SQL 2000, 2005, 2008 and access 2007 and visual Studio, Dreamweaver and IIS and even asp and .net

I really would like to work with php in a Linux enviroment.

But like I've said I'm suffering from the frustration factor and more than likley lack of focus.

I'm sure I'm not the only one out here that has the drive but seems to be missing the skills and don't know where or how to get the skills.

All this leads to a series of following questions.

1. Need an idea of a nice platform to work with, easy to set up. Suse 11??
2. Need a LAMP setup that works. I can get the Linux part going but damn that AMP part. LOL

3. The PHP part I can find tons of books and reading material for that so I think I'm good there.

Any help anyone can offer would be reatly apperciated.

Thanks folks for taking the time to read this.

Doug

this is what i tell EVERYONE
for the first 12 apache,mysql,php,... installs

build EVERYTHING from the source .This way YOU WILL LEARN how to install and configure it
do not use any prebuilt rpm's,.deb's or other.
for this reason -- they will only save you about 30 min. on install time AFTER you DO know what you are doing .

install RHEL 5.4 or CentOS 5.4 or suse-enterprise
you want a LONG life like 5 years of support
see:
"php"
http://php.net/index.php
http://www.php.net/docs.php
"apache"
http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.2/
"Compiling and Installing"
http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.2/install.html
"mysql"
http://dev.mysql.com/doc/

I personally prefer Slackware for LAMP solutions. For me they have always worked out of the box. Only recently I have encountered a missing option in MySql that will require building it from scratch if I ever need that option.

During the install, do not enable mysqld to be started automatically! You first have to configure it using a script (how to do that is described in the /etc/rc.d/rc.mysqld script).

I don't think I know how to build everything from source. I'm willing to learn so I'll take a look at what to do in just a moment.

You could start here:

http://www.howtoforge.com/perfect-server-opensuse11

Fedora preinstalls apache and mysql for certain, (accessed using "ntsysv"), don't know about PHP, but expect it does that too.