Rene Fournier wrote:
Being slightly familiar with BSD, I'm trying to get my feet wet with Linux, and was wondering if anyone can suggest a good walkthrough of setting up a CentOS server with Apache, PHP, and MySQL...
yum install httpd php php-mysql mysql-server
Et voilà.
- Is there a "right" way to install software on Linux in general, an
CentOS in particular?
Normally you use yum for doing so. http://centos.org/docs/5/html/yum should contain enough info.
For example, the Package Manager on CentOS 5.2 allows you to install certain software, but often not the latest version. So if I go download MySQL 5.0.67 from the web, how do I install it and make it play nice with the rest of the system? Ditto for PHP 5.2.6.
You can't except if you build these also as RPMs. And rebuild every other RPM which depends on those against the newly built RPMs.
And once installed (either by the Package Manager -- and by the way, why are the apps it lists so out of date?), what's the best way to update PHP and MySQL?
CentOS is not and never was about the latest and greatest. CentOS is about having a stable set of packages which do *not* change over the lifetime of the product (with a few exceptions). Security fixes are backported into these versions. More info about that can be found on http://wiki.centos.org/
Is it simply a matter of downloading the binaries again and overwriting the existing install?
No, because those will get overwritten on updates.
On Mac OS X, such downloads come as .pkg files that seem to take care of so many details without requiring a trip to the command line.
Same for RPM.
- Where should software, such as PHP, MySQL, Apache2, be installed? /
usr/bin ?
/usr/bin only when installed by the package manager. /usr/local/bin for selfcompiled packages, /opt/ for binary packages. man hier(7)
- Is it a bad idea to install some software from the command-line via
wget, some software from the graphical Package Manager, and some software from the the web? What I mean is, so far it seems like Linux manages the list of installed packages, and I just wonder if I'm screwing things up this way.
Yes. Bad idea and it *will* screw up your system. Read up on CentOS and try to understand why we ship exactly that set of packages contained in any of the 4 available CentOS versions. If you find that not having the newest software available, CentOS might not be the correct distribution for you.
If you want to have a stable set of packages supported for seven years(!), then stay with CentOS. Mixing CentOS packages and "stuff from the web" will not help with that.
Ralph