I was asked to setup a brand new empty box with Linux, mysql, php, webmin. Luckily I had a copy of Suse 9.2. Now I am not a Linux expert- I can get by, know most of the commands, even how to wget stuff, make and install. But I’d forgotten just how good YAST the Suse installer really is. Getting Suse installed on an empty box took under 20 minutes- it identified everything- not bad for a Pentium 4 box, 1Gb ram.

Network configuration was a doddle and I updated several packages from the internet- well YAST did that automatically and a newer version of the Kernel is well worth a reboot. I’ve used Webmin before- if you are struggling with Admin of a Linux system, Webmin is just superb. Once I browsed to the downloaded rpm file, YAST took over the install and before I knew it, Webmin was up and running- it uses a web interface on localhost:10000. If you’re configuring virtual sites, setting up Mysql users, etc, its very hard to beat.

Then one final test- create an index.html in the htdocs folder – yup that showed up fine and a small php file with the one line inside a php block

 phpinfo();

and that worked fine. Result! In about 2.5 hours.