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Re: preferred way to setup a LAMP stack on a laptop for development?



 Brendan Kidwell wrote: 
> I have Ubuntu 7.10 running on my Thinkpad laptop, and I think I want to 
> start doing some PHP/mysql projects on it, since I've never really BUILT 
> anything with PHP, and it might be a good idea to get that kind of 
> experience. 
> 
> Two choices I see immediately, for getting Apache and PHP and friends 
> working nicely are XAMPP < http://www.apachefriends.org/en/xampp.html > and 
> the standard Ubuntu repositories and packages. Here are my thoughts so far: 

Both will work.  It comes down to this: Is your goal to get stuff done, 
or is your goal to learn stuff and master technologies? 

If your goal is to get stuff done, Sure, XAMPP makes the daily 
administration and configuration a little easier.  You will probably get 
up and running a little quicker. 

If you truly want to understand what's going on behind the curtain, take 
the red pill.  The Apache httpd.conf is probably the best-documented, 
most heavily commented configuration file in all of Linux, and the 
website ain't bad either.  Usually you don't need to change PHP's 
configuration, so that's just a matter of installing it.  MySQL can be a 
little tricky, but in ways XAMPP doesn't help you with anyway.  And if 
you get stuck, you always have your loving family of geeks to help you 
out.  And we do have an installfest coming up real soon now. 

Configuring it all yourself will give you opportunities to learn about 
access control, URL rewriting, virtual domains, logging options, 
database optimization options, PHP's output buffering, and many more 
valuable topics. 

> What about code editing? I'm probably going to use a plain text editor, but 
> if I opt for an IDE, what's a good IDE for PHP/mysql development? 

My favorite editor I use for almost everything is http://www,jedit.org, 
which is written in Java, so it's cross-platform.  There are dozens of 
plugins to expand it, and a whole bunch of great options.  There's a 
plugin for PHP5 that will lint your program without even running it. 



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