Hi, I've recently installed Slackware and I'm still a complete newbie. I've recently got it to work as a router, but now my problem is ... how do I get Apache up and running? Apache and PHP are installed, but I want to know how to start it at boot and manually. I do lots of PHP for web development and I was hoping to have a Slack box running at home to test my pages on. After I can get Apache/PHP running, then I'll tackle MySQL.

You'll need to find where Apache is installed. It can be in a few different places. Nevertheless, once you locate Apache_dir, look for a bin directory. Inside that you should find "apachectl." You will also see "httpd" but it is better to use apachectl. In the bin directory you should run ./apachectl -k start. This will at least get Apache (the http daemon up and running). You can set up a script that will start this in /etc/rc.d, /etc/rc.d/init.d or at the very least (though, not always recommended) you can put a line in /etc/rc.local that calls for apachectl -k start.

Oh sorry, I forgot about the PHP. Look inside your PHP directory (if you haven't installed it yet) for INSTALL. It will show you a few lines that need to be put into your Apache configuration file (usually httpd.conf) to get it going with PHP support.

Any ideas where the apache bin directory is?

whereis apache ... gives me ...

apache: /etc/apache /usr/include/apache

... doesn't seem to contain a /bin directory.

First of all, make sure it is not already running:
you can do this:
# ps -e | grep httpd

If you get nothing then Apache is not running. Look in /usr/local/apache. That is the most common place for it. You can also cheat and look for it with:
# whereis apachectl
or apache2 or apache

This command should yield a location for you quickly. Did you install this from a disk or did you build it from source? Hopefully, if you built it from source, you should be able to easily find where it was installed to.

Found it at /usr/sbin. I installed apache/php by way of the Slackware install program. Thank you very much. Everything works fine. Now on to bigger and better things!

So, are you pretty decent with PHP and such? I am just getting started with it. So far the only thing I've written is a sendmail script for name and email on a website. Is there anything that stands out that helped you out with it?

PHP comes built in with a mail() function. You shouldn't have to write a function to use sendmail unless you specifically want to use a named server instead of the local mail() function.

http://us2.php.net/manual/en/ref.mail.php

... might help.