This past week has been a bit of a frustration as I tried to figure out why Joomla 1.5 running on IIS wouldn’t work the way I expected it to. At times, I wanted to just say, let’s just run this on a GNU/Linux server and let that be the end of it. With that idea in mind, I was pleased to run into TeachaGeek’s wonderfully easy to read Ubuntu Development Server tutorial.

Here’s an excerpt:

Recently I’ve been noticing lots and lots of error messages on my home development server. So, last weekend in between painting the shutters and scraping the porch, I reinstalled Ubuntu on an old IBM NetVista 6578-LAU that was given to me years ago. (NetVista… right, this thing still has a “Designed for Windows 98” sticker on it). The server’s specs are unimpressive, 700 MHz Pentium III processor, 512 MB of RAM, and I added a 160 GB HDD to it, but, it’s enough for me to play with Moodle, Joomla, and VTCalendar that I use in the websites I work with.

My requirements were fairly simple, I wanted to be able to manage the server primarily from my school-issued Windows XP laptop. I don’t mind using the Ubuntu interface, but, I primarily run this “server” without a monitor and access it via Firefox, VNC, and Samba. This led me to install Ubuntu Desktop Edition, the LAMP stack and Webmin on my little server I called Tux. The notes below are how I did it. This configuration provides the most efficient tools for me, your mileage may vary. 🙂

There is a lot more that walks you through step by step what TeachaGeek did, and well worth reading. . .if you’re into this kinda stuff. And there are a lot of folks out there who are!

I also encourage you to read his Moodle Admin Basics post…I hadn’t thought of writing about it in this way:

When Moodle is installed, four important things happen.
1 – The Moodle php files are copied into the web directory
2 – The MySQL database is populated with information that allows Moodle to run
3 – The moodledata folder is created and populated with data – this data consists of anything that your users save as well as any course data
4 – The config.php file is created and populated with information specific to the computer it is installed in

This means that before you can install Moodle you will need to make sure you have working Apache, MySQL and PHP servers.

Check it out….

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