Many of us have wanted to work on our own homemade Linux Web server, but struggled due to the lack of appropriate versions, and the knowledge to set up PHP support or even dynamic DNS. Well, fear no more; it is no longer rocket science to set up a LAMP stack at your home or office, thanks to virtual appliances from Turnkey Linux. In this article, I walk you through a simple, effective way to set up your own LAMP virtual server, using a preconfigured ISO.
Turnkey Linux is a virtual appliance library that integrates and polishes the very best open source software into ready-to-use solutions. Each virtual appliance is optimised for ease of use, and can be deployed in just a few minutes on bare metal, in a virtual machine, or on the cloud.
In this tutorial we’ll guide you through downloading the turnkey linux ISO and installing it on your machine.
Download the turnkeylinux ISO from http://www.turnkeylinux.org/download?file=turnkey-lamp-12.1-squeeze-amd64.iso
Burn the ISO to a CD
Insert the CD/DVD into your computer and boot up, make sure your motherboard is configured to boot from CD/DVD
At the Turnkey Linux bootloader screen (see Figure 6), choose Install to Hard disk and hit Enter. [note we are using a virtual machine for the tutorial as opposed to bare metal]
Figure 6: Install to hard disk –- LAMP Stack Boot splash
- Follow the on-screen instructions, and choose to install with auto-partitioning. Choose the second option that shows up, Guided Partitioning — Use Entire Disk.
- When it comes to choosing the GRUB installer, choose Yes.
- When the installation is done, click Yes to reboot.
- Enter the passwords for the root and mysql users, when prompted.
- The Backup and Migration utility (TKLBAM) doesn’t require setting up an Amazon EC2 instance. It works with local installations just as well. However, if you wish to store your backup data on Amazon, you need to subscribe to Amazon’s cloud storage service. Click Skip for the time being…
- You will now be prompted to install security updates; please choose Install, as it is a one-time operation. Once the updates have been applied, you should see a screen like the one shown in Figure 7.
- Figure 7: TKL LAMP Appliance Services Console
Checking it out
Do a test connection to the appliance by visiting the IP address mentioned in the console, which may differ for your installation. Figures 8 and 9 show the server home page and Apache service status.
Figure 8: Turnkey Linux LAMP home page
Figure 9: Apache Web server status
To make things even more user-friendly, Turnkey Linux has included the famous Webmin (Web-based server administration for managing Linux servers) as part of this appliance. To access the Web Console, from the home page click the Webmin icon. You will be asked to accept the security settings; do so and you will be taken to the Webmin login page.Log in as root, with the password you set during the first boot. The Webmin home page is shown in Figure 10.
Figure 10: Webmin home page
Now wasn’t that a breeze? You now have your personal LAMP stack up and running, ready to serve your websites. If you want to read the original article, you can find it here http://www.linuxforu.com/2011/06/lamp-server-in-10-minutes-turnkey/
