Moving at the Speed of Creativity by Wesley Fryer

Linux and WordPress

I have descended to a new depth (or height I guess, depending on your perspective) of geekdom this weekend, and I give all the credit to my friend Miguel Guhlin!

I both want and need to setup an intel-based computer (a new fast Dell actually) at work with the Linux operating system, and everything required to both run WordPress blogs and Wiki software. There are a host of collaborative projects I am working on which will benefit from these available resources. Tonight, I have a great victory to report.

I have successfully installed and configured Linux (after 3 different attempts incidentally) and have WordPress running like an apparent champion. I will save the Wiki install and setup for another day. I gave MoinMoin a quick try, but the configuration is complicated, so for tomorrow I plan to install and setup the MoinX software program on a Mac OS X computer– this option looks much more “point and click” oriented than the actual MoinMoinWiki I tried earlier tonight. If you have had success getting Wiki software configured for flexible use on a server, please let me know by commenting here or emailing me.

Here is the short version of what I did tonight, again thanks to profuse phone and IM support from Miguel. Afterward I’ll post the step by step how-to guide, which I am documenting here as much for myself (because I’m sure I’ll be doing this again) as for others who these steps may also help. These are the highlights:

  1. Download and install Ubuntu Linux.
  2. Make numerous configuration changes to the installed packages.
  3. Download and install XAMPP for Linux
  4. Download and install WordPress

Why do all of this? Because all these software solutions are FREE (open source) and extremely powerful! I cannot do now at work what these software tools will let me and others do collaboratively. We’re living in the web 2.0 world, and these software solutions are defining the “read/write web” in many ways, I think.

All of this was really not “figured out” just tonight, to be honest. 2 weekends ago I spent at least 6 hours installing and playing with the open SUSE Linux distribution and this Friday night spent at least 4 hours installing and trying (unsuccessfully) to configure Apache, PHP, and mySQL on Ubuntu Linux. The real key to my currently high satisfaction level with these free, open source software tools (besides Miguel’s patience) is XAMPP.

I don’t have a link to share yet for this installation, but hope to soon… for now, here are the steps documenting exactly what I did to successfully start from scratch with a Dell (which indicentally is so much more fun to use running Linux than it was running WinXP) and now using WordPress successfully on the box….

Linux/Wordpress install and setup procedures:

1- Download and burn ISO CD disk image for Ubunto Linux installer
2- Boot using this CD on your windows-based computer, install Ubunto Linux
3- Login, when prompted click to download and install all available updates
4- From Applications-Accessories choose Terminal.
5- Type “sudo gedit /etc/apt/sources.list” (no quotations)
6- After the first 2 commented lines, replace all lines of text with the following:

## Uncomment the following two lines to fetch updated software from the network
deb http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu breezy main restricted
deb-src http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu breezy main restricted
## Uncomment the following two lines to fetch major bug fix updated produced
## after the final release of the distribution.
deb http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu breezy-updates main restricted
deb-src http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu breezy-updates main restricted
## Uncomment the following two lines to add software from the ‘universe’
## repository.
## N.B. software from this repository is ENTIRELY UNSUPPORTED by the Ubuntu
## team, and may not be under a free licence. Please satisfy yourself as to
## your rights to use the software. Also, please note that software in
## universe WILL NOT receive any review or updates from the Ubuntu security
## team.
deb http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu breezy universe
deb-src http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu breezy universe
deb http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu breezy-security main restricted
deb-src http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu breezy-security main restricted
deb http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu breezy-security universe
deb-src http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu breezy-security universe
deb http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu breezy multiverse
deb-src http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu breezy multiverse

7- Save the file and close it.
8- In the terminal type “sudo apt-get update”
9- In the terminal fun the following commands to install various utility and other software programs (click y for yes when prompted with a question of whether or not to continue):
10- sudo apt-get install k3b
11- sudo apt-get install kgpg
12- sudo apt-get install cdrdao
13- sudo apt-get install ipodder
14- sudo apt-get install krusader
15- The last application (krusader) lets you use root user priviledges to copy and move files, but by default it does not have a program icon in the menu. To add this, first right click APPLICATIONS on the top menu bar and choose EDIT MENUS.
16- Click ACCESSORIES in the left sidebar, then click NEW ENTRY below the right sidebar.
17- Enter the name as “Krusader” and the command as all lower-case “krusader” (no quotation marks)
18- Run Krusader from the menu, clicking through the initial screens. Hold down ALT and press K to launch the Krusader file browser as root, enter your password when prompted.
19- Download XAMPP per the instructions and links on http://www.apachefriends.org/en/xampp-linux.html
20- After downloading, navigate in the Terminal to your user desktop directory (probably just cd Desktop) and type: sudo tar xvfz xampp-linux-1.5.0.tar.gz -C /opt
21- Enter your password when prompted, then you’ll see a tone of things expanded into the /opt directory of the hard drive
22- Now to start LAMPP type sudo /opt/lampp/lampp start
23- You now have Apache, MySQL, PHP, and phpMyAdmin all installed and running on your computer! To test this, point your web browser (Firefox) to http://localhost and click ENGLISH. Under Tools in the left sidebar you can click phpMyAdmin to create mySQL databases, create and assign rights to users, etc.
24- Create a database to be used by WordPress by clicking on DATABASES in phpMyAdmin, at the bottom typing the name of a new database, and then click CREATE.
25- Click on SERVER:localhost at the top to return to the main menu, then click PRIVILEGES. On the next screen click ADD A NEW USER. Enter a username and password (twice), enter the hostname as “localhost” and don’t click anything under GLOBAL rights. Click GO to create this user. Then click PRIVILEGES and click the pencil icon next to your user to edit rights. Under Database-specific privileges select your database from the popup menu and on the next screen click CHECK ALL and then GO.
24- Download the latest version of WordPress from http://wordpress.org. Download the tar.gz version to your desktop.
25- Hide all open windows by clicking the icon in the lower left corner of the screen. Double click the file you just downloaded on the desktop, click EXTRACT and then EXTRACT again to uncompress all the files onto the desktop. Now we are going to follow the “famous 5 minute install” instructions available on http://codex.wordpress.org/Installing_WordPress#Famous_5-Minute_Install
26- Open the folder “wordpress” on your desktop. Right click the file “wp-config-sample.php” and rename it “wp-config-sample.php”
27- Double click the file you just renamed to open it in a text editor.
28- Change the first 3 configuration settings (in pink) to the mySQL database name you created, your mySQL user, and your mySQL user password. Save and close the file.
29- Now you need to use Krusader to copy the entire folder from your desktop into your webserver root directory. From the APPLICATIONS- ACCESSORIES menu launch Krusader, then press Alt-K and enter your password to copy files as root.
30- In the left pane, navigate to your user desktop (/home/yourusername/Desktop) and in the right pane navigate to the XLAMPP webserver root directory (/opt/lampp/htdocs).
31- Right click on your now-configured wordpress directory and rename it if desired for the directory name you want accessible from the web. Then right click it and choose COPY. Click OK and it should be copied to the /opt/lampp/htdocs directory.
32- In your web browser, open up http://localhost/yourwordpressdirectoryname/wp-admin/install.php
33- Now click through to configure your WordPress blog. Enter a blog name and email address. On the next screen copy down the username and password. Then click to login. You are off and running with WordPress!
34- In your web browser, create a new user with admin rights and change WordPress as desired! Blog away!

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On this day..


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Comments

3 responses to “Linux and WordPress”

  1. Frank Schoolmeesters Avatar

    Thanks for using Krusader!
    The menu icon issue sould be solved with Krusader-1.70.0
    ( i have sended in a patch for the deb package ) ,
    the deb package for krusader-1.60.x and lower does not provide a menu icon.

    kind regards,
    Frank Schoolmeesters
    Krusader Krew

  2. kim Avatar
    kim

    i cannot start krusader in my ubuntu

  3. dave beall Avatar

    hey, just ran into this cool bit you put up. Thank you so much for going to the trouble to type all this for us neewbees to see. I am headed down the same path. you probably saved me a week of trying stuff, but i will still learn lots from just going thew the moves.

    Thanks again, dave