This is a tutorial on how to configure a LAMP (Linux Apache, MySQL and PHP) server from start to finish.  For space and simplicity's sake, it is assumed you already have a partition available and formatted for a Linux installation.

The first task is a Linux distribution.  There are many choices available, and the effectiveness varies on your purpose.  For large servers, Red Hat is very popular.  For our tutorial, we'll be using Damn Small Linux (DSL).

You'll need to get the ISO from the DSL download page.  Once downloaded, burn the ISO image to a CD.  If you don't have a program to do this, DeepBurner is a great free program.

The CD will be used as a boot disc.  It should automatically load, but if it does not, you need to set your BIOS settings to boot from CD before the harddrive.  You get to the BIOS by pressing either DEL, F2 or F10 (depending on which BIOS you're using).

Once DSL has loaded, you want to right-click the desktop and choose to install to harddrive then go through the steps.

Restart and load DSL.  Start Firefox and go to the XAMPP for Linux page and download the .tar.gz file.

Open a terminal window now, and copy the file to /opt (the following command assumes you saved the file to /root.  It could have been saved somewhere else.

sudo cp /root/xampp-linux-1.6.7.tar.gz /opt

Now you can extract the files

cd /opt

sudo tar xvpf xampp-linux-1.6.7.tar.gz

Finally, you can start the server

sudo /opt/lampp/lampp start

To check that the server is running, go to
http://localhost

You should get the XAMPP page.  Now you need to configure the security for XAMPP.  Back in the terminal, run the following command

sudo /opt/lampp/lampp security

This will guide you through setting passwords for the different XAMPP functions.  Once this is done, you've completed the basic functions for your LAMP server.  Now it's merely customization and tweaking.

If you need to edit the Apache configuration, the text editor to use in DSL is Beaver, and httpd.conf is located in

/opt/lampp/etc/httpd.conf

To edit the file, the command is simply

sudo beaver /opt/lampp/etc/httpd.conf

Similarly, the same is done with the PHP configuration which is in the php.ini file.

sudo beaver /opt/lampp/etc/php.ini

Any changes to either file will not take effect on the server until it is restarted.

sudo /opt/lampp/lampp restart