XAMPP on Suse
What do you do if you have a lazy no good linux admin that won’t do as he is told and you want him to enable pdo, mod_rewrite and more? Well Linux nerds are a stubborn bunch so don’t bother threatening, pleading or bribing, if the admin in question doesn’t feel like doing as he is told he won’t. That the useless nerd is actually getting paid to do stuff like this is apparently completely irrelevant.
So now you have the option of either trying to get the extensions to work by yourself or simply kill the default install of apache and mysql and override it with xampp. If you choose the latter this tutorial is for you.
Suse walk through (for some reason suse is the preferred choice among German linux nerds, don’t ask me why):
1.) Upload xampp to the server.
2.) Login through a shell as root, if you are on windows then putty is an excellent choice.
3.) cd your way to the dir that you uploaded xampp to.
4.) Run: tar xvfz xampp_filename.tar.gz -C /opt to unpack.
5.) Run: ps aux to see all processes.
6.) Run: kill # and use the numbers you see that belong to mysql and apache.
7.) Run: ln -s /opt/lampp/lampp /etc/init.d/lampp to make a symlink in the init.d dir to the lampp on/off script.
8.) Run: yast2
9.) Browse System -> System Services (Runlevel)
10.) Find mysql and apache, disable them, find lampp, enable it (use alt+option in the interface)
11.) Run: /opt/lampp/lampp start and you are done!
12.) Optionally you can run the /opt/lampp/lampp security script. If you don’t your admin will probably start whining as security – on staging servers that will never be indexed or accessed by non authorized people anyway – is a major priority for him.
13.) Very optional: Since you are now doing the admin’s job you can go to your employer and ask for the money he is paying him. If your employer is smart he will fire the admin and raise your salary.
On other flavors it’s probably done in a similar way, except for the YAST stuff.