XAMPP(Webserver) On Linux
I recently erased Fedora 9 from my hard drive, and installed Linux Mint. Im enjoying it so far but it didn’t come with a webserver. Heres a little tutorial on how to install XAMPP and get it up and running.
First of all, download XAMPP from sourceforge. As of writing this, the latest version is 1.6.7 so ill be referencing to that in the tutorial. Save it to your /home/$USER/ directory.
Extract the archive to your /opt/ directory.
sudo tar xvfz xampp-linux-1.6.7.tar.gz -C /opt
Now its installed 
To start it:
sudo /opt/lampp/lampp start
To stop it:
sudo /opt/lampp/lampp start
To launch the panel/manager:
sudo /opt/lampp/lampp panel
You can test if its on by going to http://localhost
To add files to the server, you would need to put them in /opt/lampp/htdocs/ but since that directory is owned by root, your user doesn’t have neccesary privilages. The easiest way to “get around” this is to set up a symlink folder in your home directory. You may be familiar with public_html or www directories on your webhosting, we are basically setting the same thing up here.
First we want to set up the directory we are going to link to in htdocs. So..
sudo mkdir /opt/lampp/htdocs/homefiles/
Then make the equivilant directory in our home directory.
mkdir ~/public_html/
And finally link them together.
sudo ln -S ~/public_html/ /opt/lampp/htdocs/homefiles/
So now we can put PHP files/whatnot into our ~/public_html/ folder and they will show up in localhost/homefiles/
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August 8, 2008
The path can be different, mine was in the /etc/ directory.
August 9, 2008
XAMPP sucks
use lighttpd
August 28, 2008
jerik@jerik-laptop ~ $ ln -S ~/public_html/ /opt/lampp/htdocs/homefiles/
ln: «/opt/lampp/htdocs/homefiles/»: hard link not allowed for directory
jerik@jerik-laptop ~ $ sudo /opt/lampp/lampp panel
Traceback (most recent call last):
File “xampp-control-panel.py”, line 21, in
import gtk
File “/var/lib/python-support/python2.5/gtk-2.0/gtk/__init__.py”, line 48, in
from gtk import _gtk
ImportError: /usr/lib/libcairo.so.2: undefined symbol: FT_GlyphSlot_Embolden
August 28, 2008
what I meant with the last comment is, can someone help?
September 17, 2008
Jerik, try to put “sudo ln -s ~/public_html/ /opt/lampp/htdocs/homefiles/” with -s option in lowercase.
Good luck
September 20, 2008
@Jerik
I had the same problem. Was able to start the panel by entering the following two lines:
> cd /opt/lampp/share/xampp-control-panel
> .xampp-control-panel
September 26, 2008
@Jerik again:
The command for a symlink needs to be like so:
sudo ln -s ~/public_html/ /opt/lampp/htdocs/homefiles/
Note that it’s a lowercase s and not a capital.
September 26, 2008
Ooops – didn’t notice your post Lerock *blush*
February 6, 2009
hallo i have problem,at the moment run files sudo ln -S ~/public_html/ /opt/lampp/htdocs/homefiles/
there is information or error ln: `/opt/lampp/htdocs/homefiles/’: hard link not allowed for directory
what that purpose? thanks