Paul Skinner

Looking over the referrer stats, it seems that many people reach this blog through Google searches more or less aligned with “How do I install PHP on IIS?”. I think XAMPP might be a better, and easier answer for many about to embark on a frustrating journey.

I can appreciate the need to install PHP under IIS for some purposes. For instance you need your application to co-exist in an environment where you are subject to the existing infrastructure, ranging to the more rudimentary “It’s what the client wants” concerns.

For the most part, I think we can all agree that few, if any visitors to this page would actually be building a web server to be deploy in a data-centre for production/mission critical purposes. I’d hazard that the vast majority of these visits are more interested in learning about PHP, dealing with configuration mysteries or just want a sane development environment in which to code, debug and test.

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I’m going to cheap out and review FC8 in a VM as I don’t have a partition to dedicate to a full-on hardware installation (I’ll pay for this choice a bit later) at the moment.

FC8 was downloaded directly from the fedoraproject.org site in ISO DVD format.

The first part of this post discusses some pains in getting Virtual PC to play nice with FC8… scroll ahead if you don’t care about installing under Virtual PC…

A previously installed copy of Microsoft Virtual 2007 will be used to host the FC8 install. The VM will be allocated 512MB of RAM and a 32GB virtual drive. The host OS is Windows XP on an Intel E6600 with 3GB of RAM.

Right off the bat, the graphical installation seems to be out of the question. Once beyond the bootloader, the generic framebuffer doesn’t seem to be handled well by Virtual PC 2007 but I’m sure this is fine on real hardware (in hindsight, this probably isn’t true, if you specify the kernel parameters described below during the installer’s kernel boot, the graphical install should work just fine).

The text installer software is the ever familiar Anaconda installer, where the 32GB virtual disk was partitioned and formatted using defaults most of the way along. The “Office and Productivity”, “Software Development” and “Web Server” collections were selected for installation.

The installer chugged through and completed in fairly short order.

The VM was rebooted and then things got interesting.

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I suppose that a site that discusses PHP and Linux affairs should probably have some sort of documentation or links to reasonable how-tos on the subject. However, the thought of detailing a PHP/Apache/MySQL installation doesn’t appeal to me much either, so I’ll take a different slice on this. Rather than regurgitating the same steps as every other PHP How-To, I’ll talk about some configuration choices based on the machine’s role.

Alright then, you want to install PHP on your PC or “server” type machine. I’d hazard that you’re either already running Linux or have the misfortune of running Windows. While PHP runs on just about on hardware and OS combo, the Unix flavours perform better and seem to be more stable, not to mention there is less voodoo involved in making it work right.

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