Tonight I installed two more web applications on my Mandrake 8.2 Linux server. These web applications finally give me a reason to use my Linux system. And I am gaining experience in installing the types of web applications that are typically deployed by web developers. The web development company that employed me did not encourage the use of Linux or open source web applications. They are really behind the times but now that I’m cut loose from them I don’t intended to limit myself in my expertise.
First I installed phpBB, a bulletin board system that is so popular that I’ve already used it many times as a user. It was the easiest PHP application to install. I didn’t run into too many problems. You do need to delete the install and contrib directories before it will allow you to log in. Also I was unable to log into the administration menu until I changed my server name.
In the screen shot below you can see that it is complaining that the config.php file can’t be written but at least it offers to download the file someplace rather than giving me an error.
It did shut me out of the Administration menu for quite a while until I figured out that my browser was just having problems with the server name which needs to be localhost because this system cannot resolve any other DNS name.
After installing phpBB I installed WordPress 2.0.2 which is now one of my favorite web applications. I’ve used Blogger before for very occasional blogging but I didn’t really get into blogging until I was running a blog on my very own web site. WordPress did not give me many problems except for the fact that my download was corrupt. I had to use Firefox to download a good file. Unfortunately my linux server is cut off from the Internet so there is not much point in running a blog on it:
