I’ve just installed Apache 2 and PHP5 on my little EEEpc running Ubuntu and I was quite pleased with how easily it went on there despite a few little niggles.

So because its the new year and because the Krypton Factor is back on TV (minus the flight sim! - what were they thinking?) heres how I did it for anyone that might be trying.

Firstly you will need to get and install all the required bits and bobs namely apache 2 and php 5, so fire up a shell and do the following:

sudo apt-get install apache2
sudo apt-get install php5
sudo apt-get install libapache2-mod-php5
sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart

Hopefully all will have gone swimmingly and you can test your install by going to http://127.0.0.1 in your favorite web browser

The first issue I came across with this install was that apache couldn’t work out its hostname properly so was having a guess at it. Although this works fine locally anything trying to access your web server from elsewhere might have a bit of trouble finding it. Fortunately this is easy enough to fix. Again in the shell find out your hostname by issuing the fhostname command:

hostname

copy the result of the command so we can add it to the apache configuration file…

sudo vi /etc/apache2/httpd.conf

and add a server name command followed by the host name you copied earlier e.g.

ServerName my-host-name

Non vi lovers might like to know you need to press ‘i’ before you can add anything to the file and you need to press esc then type ‘:wq’ followed by return to write the file and quit.

Restart apache with ‘sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart’ and away you go.

The next issue I encountered was a missing log file directory after reboot which was stopping the httpd service from starting automatically. Simply add the directory and set the permissions to fix this one:

sudo mkdir /var/log/apache2/
sudo chmod 751 /var/log/apache2/

Bingo! all done. Don’t say I never give you nowt.