[CentOS] Good [L]AMP tutorial for CentOS 5.2 ?

Sat Oct 11 12:16:16 UTC 2008
Ralph Angenendt <ra+centos at br-online.de>

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.

> 1. 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 way, why are the apps it lists so out of date?), what's the best way to 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. 

> 2. 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)


> 3. 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
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