I just setup my machine at home with Ubuntu 8.10 (desktop) which was so easy think I saved hours off the time it would normally take with Windows. So much is already installed and ready to go and with apt (or the Synaptic package manager) it’s super quick to download and install extra things things like MySQL, PHP, Apache, Java etc
Here are some notes which helped me out when configuring some of these development tools.
This assumes you’ve already installed Apache and MySQL, for notes on installing these I found this article to be a great resource.
If you get this message when you restart Apache, “Could not reliably determine the server’s fully qualified domain name, using 127.0.1.1 for ServerName”, edit /etc/apache2/conf.d/fqdn and add “ServerName localhost”:
sudo nano /etc/apache2/conf.d/fqdn
Load the mod_rewrite module for Apache
sudo a2enmod rewrite
Enable your Apache vhosts
I already had all my vhosts defined in separate .conf files on my windows box, so I copied them all into /etc/apache2/sites-available and setup symbolic links from my /etc/apache2/sites-enabled:
sudo ln -s /etc/apache2/sites-available/mysite.conf /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/mysite.conf
Download and install PHP
sudo apt-get install php5 libapache2-mod-php5
PHP connector to MySQL
sudo apt-get install libapache2-mod-auth-mysql php5-mysql
Install MySQL Administrator
sudo apt-get install mysql-admin
Install subversion
sudo apt-get install subversion
I am also using Pulse to manage my eclipse development environment so I needed Java which I got from the Synaptic Package Manager (sun-java6-bin). Pulse is super cool, I used the standard cfeclipse profile with the addition of the PHP PDT (for developing in PHP).