Setting up WordPress on a Ubuntu server

This is meant to give an easy to understand description of how I got WordPress working under Ubuntu Dapper Drake. It is not meant to be an in-depth explanation of how to set up WordPress, it is just how I got things running and I hope it will help others who have the same problems that I had.

First check that Apache and PHP5 are working by typing the following in a terminal

sudo sh -c "echo '<?php phpinfo(); ?>' > /var/www/info.php"


and then pointing your browser at http://localhost/info.php to see a page showing your installed PHP version.

If PHP is working then install WordPress with Synaptic, if it isn’t you need to set up your server correctly.

After installing WordPress make a backup of your Apache configuration file with

sudo cp /etc/apache2/apache2.conf /etc/apache2/apache2.conf.bak


Now you need to edit your Apache configuration file with

gksudo gedit /etc/apache2/apache2.conf


and paste the following block of code directly after where Alias/icons is defined.

Alias /blog /usr/share/wordpress
<Directory /usr/share/wordpress>

Options FollowSymLinks
AllowOverride Limit Options FileInfo
DirectoryIndex index.php
</Directory>

Restart Apache with -

sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart

Now you are ready to run the configuration script to make a database and set up connection with -

sudo sh /usr/share/doc/wordpress/examples/setup-mysql -n wordpress localhost

Where wordpress is the name of the user and the database. If your server has a virtual host name you should use that instead of localhost. In either case there will be an error message saying that a symbolic link could not be made because no such file or direcrory exists but this message can be ignored.

Now point your browser at http://localhost/blog and WordPress will walk you throgh the rest of the setup.

Non-Ubuntu stuff

I intend to mainly discuss Ubuntu topics in this blog but if I feel like it I will also comment on other issues. Here is a picture to check that I can upload correctly.

Hello world!

I am an Englishman who has spent most of his adult life working in other countries. I have been living in Vienna, Austria since 1998 but that is all another story. This blog is (mainly) about Ubuntu, so here I will simply explain how I came to be an Ubuntu enthusiast.

When I first moved to Vienna I happened to buy a book called “Linux for Dummies” which contained an installation CD for SuSE Linux 5.3. This was my first introduction to Linux and I have never looked back.

I faithfully remained a SuSE aficionado until SuSE -10 when Novell took over and totally wrecked the backup system I had been using for years (I was using Mondo by Hugo Rabson). Dispite several emails to Novell they never had the courtesy to reply, so in 2005 I moved to Fedora Core 4. Fedora Core is an excellent distibution and I found many things to be much easier than with SuSE. It was only after reading an article in Linux Magazine about Ubuntu that I decided to install Ubuntu on a second partition and try it out. I was absolutely smitten! Every thing just works and the few problems I have had have been quickly resolved by searching the Ubuntu Forums

All I want to do on this blog is to offer links to some of the Ubuntu resources that I find useful, some tips, tricks and tweaks I have found out about and to blog any “problems ” I have encountered while playing around with Ubuntu, together with the solutions I used to solve the problems.

I just hope that the blog will be useful to someone