The Frustrations of Software (2)

Note to reader: Things here are seriously geeky :) !

Well, as you will have read in the last "episode", I was getting pretty frustrated with Ubuntu's installation system.

So, I did something else for a while and then went to bed. This morning I was slowly recovering conciousness when a stray thought wandered through my mind ..... was I looking at an error message about my instruction, or one about myself ??? When you try to do an installation in Linux you either have to be an administrator or provide the admin's password. What I had done was create the system and a user ID for me without ever setting up a password for the root (or administrator) ID. OK. Look up how to do that, and do that. Great. Now go find the instructions on how to set up LAMP again. The ones for this that I used are here and seem pretty accurate.

Next, set up Apache and try out looking at the localhost site. It works - yippee ! OK. I'm doing something right here, so let's try for PHP too ! I'm going to try out PHP5, as that looks like the one I'll need to use in the future, at the very least.

Two swift commands later it seems that I've done it. I create a small php test file and get FireFox to look at it - it does, and shows all the php versioning, which is great !

Finally, MySQL. This is a database system very popular for use with web sites. Actually installing the database isn't particularly difficult, but the intricacies of some of the later setup have to be addressed carefully.

After all this said, however, I have to say that setting up a LAMP system is an amazingly easy thing to do. I have set up AMP systems on Windows before, and none of them have been as easy as this. The easiest thing these days appears to be getting your head around what appear to be crazy insane Linux/UNIX commands, but, in fact, they do make sense after a surprisingly short period.

Next; onwards and upwards: a small intro page and some tricks !

Note to reader: End-of-geek :) !

To finish with, the AG's daughter is learning the saxophone. I can see that she has a political career ahead of her !

Other good points of the weekend have been two-fold. Firstly, England beat Australia by 12 points to 10, and then France beat New Zealand by a similar margin - 20 to 18. Boy but it was tense in the last few minutes ! Now it'll be England vs France in one semi-final and South Africa vs Argentina in the other. Association Football appears to be standing aside gracefully over there for Rugby Union Football to be seen, which is a great spirit to show: I just hope the Pumas can show really well against the Springboks. We shall see.)

That's it for now. Have fun.