Hello to all This is my first post on this forum, so please bear with me. First of all, I'm a total newbie to Linux. I have been developing software for Windows for several years now (using Visual C++), but till yesterday I could not even tell you how to properly shutdown Linux using the command line--just to give you an example of my noobishness (now I know: login as root, then type in: shutdown now). I had a HTTP and PHP server running on Windows some years ago and it was pretty easy to set up. I have currently set up an old PC of mine with Ubuntu Server 7.04. I want to use it as a HTTP, PHP, and MySQL server, since I agree that Linux is much safer than Windows, not only when it comes to servers. Now my questions/problems: 1) Which is a good distribution for this kind of servers? Can I stick with Ubuntu? 2) In Ubuntu, is there a way to use a GUI? Because currently I only have the 'standard' Linux command line and that makes it very hard for a Linux newbie to setup a whole server. 3) At this moment, I could not even tell you where Apache wants the PHP and HTML to be, or how to configure Apache to my needs. Don't get me wrong here, if I have to, I will learn the hard way how to use the command line and how to do this, by try and error. But if there's a chance for me to use a GUI which easily guides you to all the settings, file systems, etc, without affecting the server's stability and security, I'd like to use it. 4) If someone has read good tutorials on this topic, I'd appreciate if you post the link. I apologize if these topics have already been discussed a myriad times. I have already googled for solutions, but either the pages were too specific (that is, too professional for a novice) or they were too vague. Thanks in advance for help Take care, Liac
You can use Ubuntu. In fact as a n00b I would strongly suggest it. You can install X desktop but its not a GUI pertaining to the LAMP config. ISPConfig or Webmin to help with the LAMP config but I've found that both require some amount of base knowledge of the relation ships between LAMP apps to be really useful. Ahh the beauty of Ubuntu. You don't need to worry about the installation of each component. Just use apt to install apache2, php and mysql and *presto* you've avoided HOURS of work that used to be required to setup a LAMP server under GNU/Linux. The next tricky part is to know that all the config files for each will be somewhere in the /etc tree (/etc/apache2/ for apache configs). I'm sure there are a TON of good articles on Apache config but to get you started nice and quick your HTDOCS directory (root of your website) by default is /var/www/html. Put some HTML/PHP in there and hit your server by IP and you should see it. Hope that at least gets you on some sort of path.. Volks
Thank you for your reply! I have already managed to install the Apache and PHP server (Ubuntu really does almost everything for you). Now I wonder if there is a way to easily transfer files over the network? Something like a "remote control" that I can install on my Windows machine, with which I can access my server, copy files back and forth, etc. So that I can copy and use my already written PHP scripts/HTML webpages on my server without the need to burn them to a CD every time.
I use Putty as a command line and WinSCP for file transfer, but there are many options. As a how to/tutorial, simply consult http://www.howtoforge.com/perfect_setup_ubuntu_6.06 or one of the variants
