For simple communication between a group of friends, I would guess that php-nuke or phpbb would do pretty well. They are easy to install and most disro's already have the required servers (MySQL or PostgeSQL, Apache, and PHP.)
I have a friend that went to school over-seas and wanted to keep his graduating class in touch. Together, we installed php-nuke, myPHPNuke, and phpBB. In the end he went with phpBB, because he liked the private messenger feature and simple management.
Quick reference:
http://www.phpbb.com http://www.phpnuke.org http://myphpnuke.com
If I were to build your site, I would do the following:
1. Make sure that I had MySQL, Apache, and PHP installed. (Make sure that MySQL server is installed, not just the client.)
2. Download phpBB from.... you guessed it
www.phpbb.com. Using Mozilla, save the fiile phpbb-2.0.6.tar.bz2 to the /var/www/htdocs folder.
(Try this to find your htdocs folder:
bash-2.05b# locate htdocs )
3. Decompress the download using the tar command.
bash-2.05b# tar -jxvf phpBB-2.0.6.tar.bz2
4. Open Mozilla and browse to
http://localhost/phpBB2/docs/INSTALL.html. Read the install file.
5. Open a terminal window and change to the directory /var/www/htdocs/phpBB2.
bash-2.05b# cd /var/www/htdocs/phpBB2
6. Change the permissions on the config.php file located in the phpBB2 directory. You have to do this for the script to function properly. This makes the page writable. You will remove this permission later (security).
bash-2.05b# chmod 666 config.php
7. Open Mozilla and browse to
http://localhost/phpBB2/install/install.php. Fill out all of the the fields as shown here:
Database type: MySQL 4
(If unsure of database number type the following
bash-2.05b# mysqladmin version )
Server name: localhost
Database name: mysql (most distro's already have a mysql and test db)
Database user: root (do not hunt me down concerning security, this is just an example) ;-)
Password: ******
Administrator username: Bruce Almighty (does not have to be system user)
Password and confirmation:*******
Click Install
8. Remove the install/ and contrib/ directories.
bash-2.05b# cd /var/www/htdocs/phpBB2
bash-2.05b# rm -rf install contrib
9. Open Mozilla to
http://localhost/phpBB2/index.php
Enjoy!
Installing two sites just means that you will have to duplicate steps three through nine. Or better yet, after uncompressing the site just copy the phpBB2 folder to something original like phpBB2-Friends. Just make sure that you have another database setup first.
If you need help setting up MySQL databases and do not have a clue how to do it, perhaps you could try webmin available at
http://webmin.com. If you can install an RPM package, then you will love this tool. It is available in tar.gz also. Webmin allows graphical configuration of the linux system.
If you have questions about setting up Apache, please try reading the docs. They are a great reference. Try the locate command for httpd, httpd.conf, and htdocs.
Hopefully this will help you on the command line as well. :-)
-WP
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