I’m getting better at this Linux stuff. Today’s project was to get the Apache Web server running on my system and play around with it a bit. Eventually that machine will function as a staging server for some changes that I want to do to this Web site. Today I wanted to get all the software installed and make sure that PHP and MySQL are functioning correctly. As is most often the case, things didn’t go as expected.

I started up the SuSE installation program and told it to install Apache, PHP, and MySQL. Everything installed okay, but when I tried to start the Web server I got a rather unhelpful message telling me that the multiprocessing module failed to start. No details, no log file entries. Just “Failed.” Don’t you just hate it when that happens? I only spent an hour searching documentation and trying different configuration options before I decided to run the online update to see if there was a newer version on SuSE’s update site. There was, along with a kernel update and a few other things. I find it odd that the update system doesn’t identify the specific problems that a patch addresses.

In any case, I have Apache running now and can begin my PHP/MySQL experiments.