I spent an incredibly frustrating few hours on Wednesday night, and another couple of hours here tonight trying to get Mambo installed on my SuSE Linux system.  This turned out to be way more difficult than I had imagined, not because Mambo itself is difficult to install, but because getting Apache, PHP, and MySQL all talking together is something of a black art.  At least, it’s not well documented in any of the normal places I looked (like on the PHP, Apache, and MySQL Web sites).  They all have bits and pieces of information that, in retrospect, combine to make it all coherent.  I had just about given up on it when I stumbled across a beautifully written document on Novell’s Web site:  Installing Apache, PHP, and MySQL on SUSE LINUX Professional.

Kevin Millecam‘s instructions led me step-by-step through installing the relevant packages from the SuSE 9.1 distribution CD, including configuring the servers and making sure all the right permissions were set.  Even with the mess my previous experiments had made of the configuration files, I was able to get it all working in just a few minutes.  If you’re looking to install PHP and MySQL on your Linux box, read this document.  It’s specific to SuSE Linux, but a lot of it will be useful if you’re installing on some other distribution.  Highly recommended.

Kudos to Novell for sponsoring the Cool Solutions community site.  We need more encouragement of authors to submit this kind of helpful documentation, and major Linux vendors would do well to make it available.