Install Linux

pixelstream — Wed, 20 Jun 2007 10:13:51 +0000

There many Linux distributions available for us to choose from. If you prefer it to be free and easy to use, Fedora, Ubuntu or Debian are the best choice. Here I recommend Debian.

1. Get an image of Debian Network Install CD
There many CD images for Debian package, but we don’t need all of them. We can just download a network install CD, which is the minimal requirement for an installation. After the base packages are installed, we can download any package and install it on the server.
The current stable release of Debian is 4.0. It is about 160Mb.
2. Burn the image into a CD
In short, just create a bootable CD.
3. Install Debian
The official installation Guide is here. The quick way is put the CD in CD drive, set your PC boot from CD, (make sure you have backed up all your data on your hard drive), start the machine and you will enter installer in text mode. Just use the default settings and you will finish the installation in about 30 minutes. This process is the base configuration. You can change base configuration after installation by typing in this command:

#base-config

4. Configuration
During the installation you will be prompted to add a new normal user, apart from the root user. This is necessary and you need to remember your username and password. As a root user you are able to install new packages such as MySQL and Apache. As a normal user you can access your website files on the network drive, which is shared through SAMBA on Linux. This is convenient since you can use powerful IDEs on your desktop to start coding.

LAMP

pixelstream — Tue, 19 Jun 2007 09:05:07 +0000

Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP or Perl are the foundation of many Web applications, from personal blogs to enterprise e-commerce sites. This architecture is known as LAMP. LAMP is very popular among some web developers because it is a flexible, low-cost environment in which to work. It is 100% free and you can easily set it up on your home computers.

Set up LAMP at home

Ideally you should have:

1. Broadband connection and a Broadband 4-Port Switch Router.
2. A Pentium 586+ PC for installing LAMP server.

If you don’t, no worries, mate. You can set up LAMP on your one computer – your desktop. But you need to use VMWare Server or Virtual PC.

Now we can start by following these steps:

1. Install Linux
2. Install Apache, MySQL and PHP
3. Install Samba
4. Install local DNS
5. Setup your developement sites

Max Chu's Blog

Install Linux

LAMP