Please bear with me. I have a few questions and I will honestly try not to make this post any longer than I have to.

Let me preface by saying that I am so new to Linux that I played around with Ubuntu for a couple of hours, got completely confused, dumped it, and installed MEPIS. I discovered I can get around in MEPIS pretty nicely, it makes sense to me, so I can't see going anywhere else.

First, in Win XP I had an Abyss server, by aprelium.com, and had mysql installed, along with PHP4. I had to download it from the mysql site and install it. However, I looked in the synaptic list and I see mysql-client, mysql-server, and so on. I cannot figure out which one I should use. Any suggestions? I will also install phpmyadmin, but that looks straightforward.

What I am planning to do is build another site, with a CMS (probably Mambo, Xoops, or e107 - not doing anything large or commercial), but in Linux. i haven't looked yet to see if any CMSes are in synaptic as packages, but I thought I saw Drupal passing by as I scrolled through.

My second question is how do I install an app that I download directly from somewhere like source forge? The synaptic thing makes sense but I am not sure how to do it from a straight download ... and where do I download it to?

Finally ... I found the Apache2 directory but I am not sure where the root is for a website (where the typical index.html would reside). In Abyss is was the htdocs folder but I am not sure about Apache. How is this accomplished with Apache?

Any help will be greatly appreciated. Sorry if this is too long, but I really like what I have seen in MEPIS and I want to jump right in and learn quickly. Thank you.

Okay, I have mysql all set up (4.1), and phpmyadmin password protected and able to get into, and administer, mysql with it. Now, all I need to figure out is where in Apache to begin my website, in other words, where is the main root directory for Apache where the index.html will go and the site begins? Thanks in advance.

Okay, to answer my own questions, and to perhaps help other newbies I think I have figured out the web server thing.

It looks like it all begins in /var/www/. However, it looks like that is modifiable in /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/000.default, where you can change the DocumentRoot to ... oh ... say, /var/www/site. Then you could make an actual directory /var/www/site and put all your website stuff in there, or just use the base /var/www, as is. This could be helpful if you want to test out various CMSes, and have them in their own directories, I suppose.

If I am way off base here, someone please let me know. I am winging this at the moment.

First off, welcome to MEPIS

Second, the configuration file for Apache2 is located at /etc/apache2
In there, you have httpd.conf , apache2.conf and /sites-available/default
These three files will let you control Apaches to the way you want it. These will be very similar, if not the same, to the windoze version of Apache2.

Enjoy