Linux – Damn Small Linux with XAMPP Linux to create a webserver on a P4 machine or Mele A2000

apache-http-serverdamn-small-linuxintel-pentiumlinuxxampp

A couple of days I'am busy to figure out to create a powerful light weight server that can be used as webserver to serve some simple sites that using PHP and mod-rewrite.

The P4-box (actually a laptop, dell latitude c640) i'm using came with windows XP Prof. The problem is that windows consumes more memory and has some TCP/IP stack problems (it is limited) because it can only serve up to 10 (and 40 with a hack) connections a time.

Before this have also bought a Mele A2000 ARM device (china thingy) that comes with Android 4.0, a nice little box that is quiet and is power friendly, just 5 watts. On this device I also tried several things but doens't get ARM linux on it and all software solutions on Android uses Lighttpd which does not support mod rewrite like Apache.

So i start searching the net for a linux distro for the P4-box and found many, to figure out what is the best, it is very difficult for me because of my Windows background (don't want a headless system). Tried several ones and then I found Damn Small Linux (or DSL), looks great and works okay on a very small footprint. Exactly what i'm looking for.

Then I search on DSL+Apache+PHP+mySQL and found the XAMPP Linux version (I use also XAMPP on Windows to test websites, and found a blog that XAMPP must be working on DSL). I found only information how to do it but there is no iso or disk image around with these two worlds combined (at least i didn't find it).

I tried to setup a diskimage (2GB) with use of VMWare, that is working great. The idea is to first try it in VMWare and after that convert the disk to a physical disc without damaging systems or hardware. I have used the DSL install to setup a debian installation (the "install to harddrive" option in the tools menu. Reboot and works okay.

After this i downloaded XAMPP Linux (http://www.apachefriends.org/en/xampp-linux.html) and follow the instructions on this page. Installed it as superuser but get errors at the install, one about SQL (something with syntax error in a command-line utility) and one error the end (something I didn't understand) but install proceeds and completes.

Then I tried to run 'lampp' or 'xampp' and the only thing I see is floating point exceptions (see image) and doesn't look ok.

enter image description here

In short, my questions are:

  • Is there a DSL+XAMPP image around that I can use (can make my life much easier ;-))
  • If not, what i'm doing wrong (is it really possible or is there something wrong with the latest version of both?)
  • Is there a lightweight distro with XAMPP installed or PHP+Apache+mod_rewrite+mySQL available? ARM or x86?
  • Or is it better to take my hands of this and try to figure out to hack windows stack to get more connections
  • Or do you have other suggestions?

Best Answer

DSL is debian based so you can add the Debian or Ubuntu repos, and then then just do the normal stuff.

sudo apt-get update <--- after added the repos
sudo apt-get install apache2
sudo apt-get install mysql-client mysql-server
sudo apt-get install php5

You can add the extensions that you need.

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