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 way, why are the apps it lists so out of date?), what's the best way to 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 -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 194 bytes Desc: not available URL: <http://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos/attachments/20081011/96cf2a02/attachment-0005.sig>