Turn on the XAMPP - Part 1

The Ubuntu forums has a great thread for setting up your XAMPP environment in Ubuntu, but it can be a hassle to read through the entire thread at to get to what you need to get up and running.

This is going to be Part 1, Getting XAMPP installed and running. In the next part or two, I’ll touch on tweeking some things to make it easier to work with.

First, you need to download XAMPP, do this on the Apache Friends website. If you do not change it, the default download destination for Firefox is your desktop, so open a terminal window and

cd Desktop

If the tar.gz file is not in your Desktop, then you need to move to the directory it is in.

Then execute this command - BUT make sure the file name matches the version you just downloaded. As of this posting, this is the current version.

sudo tar xvfz xampp-linux-1.6.5a.tar.gz -C /opt

This extracts everything to the /opt folder.

You then have two options to start the XAMPP service. You can execute this on the command line;

sudo /opt/lampp/lampp start

And this to turn it off;

sudo /opt/lampp/lampp stop

But a ‘better’ way is to add a launcher for the GUI Control Panel.

Right click on the Applications menu and choose Edit Menus and this brings up the Main Menu editor. The left panel shows the structure tree for the different categories, the right shows what items are preselected for each category. Some may be not checked, in which case they don’t show up on your menu.

Choose which category you want to put the XAMPP Control Panel and click the New Item button. Under Type, leave it as Application. For the Name put XAMMP Control Panel (or whatever you want), under Command put in gksudo “python /opt/lampp/share/xampp-control-panel/xampp-control-panel.py”
and under Comment put something like Start/Stop XAMPP. Then click the launch pad icon to change that, paste this in to the box on the top of the window that pops up - /usr/share/icons/gnome/scalable/actions/gtk-execute.svg

You can also browse to the other folders and pick an icon you like better, but this is the same icon used on the GUI itself, so it fits.

Click OK, then Close, then Close, and your menu item should appear where you put it. It will ask you for your password when it runs, so make sure you start it from an account with proper access.

Now open your browser and in the address line type localhost and hit Enter - you should see the XAMPP splash screen. In the next part, there are a few security things to touch on, then there is setting up a mirror directory so it’s a bit easier to work with your files and eventually there is setting up virtual domains to make it easy to browse to your different ’sites’.