It’s been over a year since I wrote ‘How to set up LAMP on Ubuntu Desktop Edition‘. Has anything changed? Is there anything to add? Let’s find out.

My wife is now working with me so I have decided that she too requires her own dev server, giving me a perfect opportunity to start from scratch. I downloaded the latest edition of Ubuntu (Ubuntu 8.0.4 LTS Desktop Edition to be exact) and followed my old howto.

What has changed?

Fortunately not a lot. However, there are a couple of things to note.

When installing mysql-server you have to define a root password. I can’t recall doing that before. No biggy, just enter a password and get on with it.

However, when installing phpmyadmin you have to specify that you want to use it with apache2. NOTE: you have to specifically choose apache2 by hitting space and then return. If you simply hit return (what I did) then no alias is setup to allow you to access phpmyadmin via http://localhost/phpmyadmin/. What if you made that mistake too? Here’s what I did:-

sudo ln -s /etc/phpmyadmin/apache.conf /etc/apache2/conf.d/phpmyadmin.conf
sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart

Apart from that little hiccup everything worked fine like before.

Is there anything to add?

My previous post attracted quite a few support comments, so it’s worth reading over those if you have any questions that may already be answered there. I am going to outline one niggle below though.

Each time you restart apache2 you get this message:-

apache2: Could not reliably determine the server’s fully qualified domain name, using 127.0.0.1 for ServerName

This is unimportant unless you are running a live server that should have a fully qualified domain name! Nevertheless, it’s a little annoying and can be fixed like this:-

gksudo gedit /etc/apache2/httpd.conf

Add the line:-

ServerName localhost

Restart apache2

sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart

And the message should no longer appear.

That’s it! If you have any questions with regard to setting up LAMP on the Ubuntu Desktop Edition then please don’t hesitate to leave them below and I’ll do my best to answer them.

For my next post I will be describing in detail how I set up my wife’s laptop (running Windows Vista) to use her Ubuntu test server as a mapped network drive, allowing her to work on files ‘live’.

This is my ideal setup, as it gives you the benefits of using windows for your desktop environment while at the same time giving you the power of working on your websites directly on a LAMP server. The only disadvantage is that it requires 2 computers, but with the cost being so low these days this shouldn’t be a huge problem. Time to dust off that old computer in the corner and use it as a LAMP server.