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Topic: Portable Dev. Center Project

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dracolytch Offline

Group: Members
Posts: 1
Joined: June 2006

Posted: June 06 2006,19:17

Ok, I'll cover what I'm trying to do, then describe how far I've gotten, and see if I'm headed in the right direction.

I'm a little familiar with Linux, but I'm no guru. I know some basic shell commands, and have installed software from RPMs and such, but I've never installed from a compile.

I'm trying to set up a linux distro which will contain a LAMP development environment, on a USB drive. So, in addition to Linux/Apache/MySql & PHP, I'd also like a nice text editor and a copy of GIMP.

Here's how far I've gotten:
I tried running the embedded version, but it failed on the IBMs at work.

I installed a bootable (HD not ZIP) version on my pen drive. I've gotten it to boot and run well (toram is a beautiful command).

On subsequent boots, I've had trouble figuring out what is saved, and what is not. Google as my homepage in FF was saved (Yay), but the desktop image was not (Boo).

I used the desktop app to download a copy of Apache/PHP. I was able to uncompress it to a folder. After reading the readme, it looked like I needed to compile it (Or is there a better way to install these extensions with a USB drive?). First problem: I wasn't sure where to set apache's base path to (So I told it to use a subdirectory on the ramdisk). Second problem: I was able to start the Apache install process, but it said it couldn't find a compiler. So now I'm stuck.

I didn't see MySQL on the list of extenstions right off... Maybe I was looking in the wrong category. Still, I'll also need a nice text editor too, and I don't know if I can download one for DSL.

So: Am I using the wrong install type of this distro to do what I need to do? Am I barking up the wrong tree? Should I be using another technique, or look at another distro? Is there a walkthrough of how to install Apache/PHP/MySQL to the USB drive, so on subsequent boots it'll run?

Any help/guidence appreciated.
~D

clacker

Group: Members
Posts: 570
Joined: June 2004

Posted: June 06 2006,20:14

I would recomend trying xampp for linux, which is lampp. That gives you the apache server, php, mysql and more all in one big package. All of the packages are precompiled and ready to go. The basics of installing it are to untar the package into /opt and then start lampp:

tar -xzvf xampp-linux-version-number.tar.gz -C /opt
/opt/lampp/lampp start
/opt/lampp/lampp security

DSL has the beaver text editor, which is OK, as well as vim. The vim.uci package has gvim which is a little better at syntax highlighting. There is a dsl extension for gimp 1.2 in the applications section of the repository.

As far as storing everything perminantly, you could put the xampp tar package somewhere on the key and then add the steps to load xampp off of the usb key in the /opt/bootlocal.sh script. So you'd add a line for mounting the key, untarring xampp, starting lammp, and unmounting the key. Make sure to add /opt/bootlocal.sh to filetool.lst so that the script gets backed up. Also add the directories with your working files. I believe extensions on the root level of the usb key get loaded automatically, so I'd put you gimp extension there. You might want to make sure that you have xampp in a subdirectory so dsl doesn't try to load it because it will try to load it to / instead of /opt.

meo

Group: Members
Posts: 552
Joined: April 2004

Posted: June 07 2006,23:06

Hi dracolytch!

I just made a remaster adding the packages clacker mentions (xampp, gimp-1.2) and I added emacs as my preferred editor. It worked nice as far as I can tell but it really eats RAM. If you are interested just check out page 51 in the remaster HOWTO in this topic and just add the untarring procedure clacker mentions.

Have fun,
meo

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"Live and let live" Treat others the way you want to be treated because that's what you should expect from them.

"All that is very well," answered Candide, "but let us cultivate our garden." - Francois-Marie Arouet Voltaire

2 replies since June 06 2006,19:17

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