I got Apache and PHP running easier than in W98
 

I work in my college ans part of my duties is answering questions about how to install and set up Apache, PHP and MySQL on windows machines.
As I was trying to do it myself I found my W98 would make it harder than before.
I didn't have all the neede dlls for php.exe. odbc32.dll was missing. I tried Apache 2 and 1.3 and all I got (after grabbing the missing dlls from the pffice CD) then php would hang for ever and never return the page I requested...

Besides it was ugly how apache ran in a console window and that the only way to shut it downt was killing the console.

I have a dual boot system (w98 / redhat 9) so I remembered all the software I needed already was in the RH cds.
I used APT to install apache, PHP and MySQL. I was happy to see those appeared as the services automagically. Now it feels more professional to start and stop those programs.
On w98 I had to edit files to get apache talk to php. On linux everything get automatically configured. I don;t even know where those apps got installed. I just start them and point mozilla to localhost/ and that's it.

On top of that I installed nucleus and PHP-nuke. I think this is the first time doing something in linux was easier than doing it on windows.

I think this success story was possible because of my first success story, when I was able to install APT and generate apt-enabled iso images of the RedHat cds on my Hard drive. Without apt installing PHP would have been a bit harder since it has a few dependencies.