So first, I have to say. DAMN! Linux has come along way since I first played with it in college a few years ago, (and of course this blog and the accompanying domain is hosted on a Linux Server!) For my Windows friends, you know the websites you visit on the W3, chances are they are Linux not Windows! Next time you go to a website that doesn’t seem to work right, check the URL in the address bar of your browser chances are it will have “.asp” or “aspx” in it some where (Active Server Pages) Microsoft’s answer to PHP (although Windows Servers can have PHP also for their server side scripting).

Bottom line… When I set up my WAMP it took a couple of hours to get everything working right! On Linux, (since most distributions come with Apache, a couple SQL servers, and all the basic programming and scripting languages/tools you may need, it took about 5 minutes or less to configure my LAMP stack. Basically since Debian links the default apache2 configure file else where to better manage virtual hosts, all I had to do was change one line in the “000-default” file to point to a directory in my home directory.

# This is for Debian Distro 5.0.3 (lenny)
$ locate 000-default
# Should return: /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/000-default
# Open as root, I use:
$ sudo nano /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/000-default
# and change the line “DocumentRoot /var/www/”
# to read “DocumentRoot /home/your-user-name/what-ever-dir-you-want-to-be-the doc-root/”
# see highlighted text below

Start a browser and go to “localhost”, there it is! Course ya really have to put a index.html, index.php, etc in the directory first,,, Duh!

It should be noted that this is only if your the only one on the computer doing development. If you are setting up a multi-user system where multiple persons are going to need there own virtual root to do development, etc. then RTFM on virtual hosts.

So LAMP vs. WAMP?
You have to ask?