OK, so last you saw Slackware was driving me insane with installing but not quite. Having tried to re-install several times the solution ended up being fairly simple. Not to install Slackware. Instead, I went and downloaded Ubuntu Server.
Fortunately for me this installed first time without any trouble. Unfortunately for me, I didn’t realise this version came without X (which is what allows me to use a mouse and point and click instead of typing commands). Thankfully for me one of my housemates isn’t too bad with such things and between us we managed to get Apache installed with PHP (that actually works!) and share the web directory through Samba so I can just upload code to it from my machine.
So, looks like we are getting there. The Hardware and software side of my system are complete, now all i require is an application to run it on. As my project assumes I can just get MSSQL and PHP to just talk I am working on this bit now. I have a test database setup and some code which should work. But of course it doesn’t, but to be fair I haven’t really looked into that yet.
For the meantime I have been more interested in the other side of my project which I’m less keen on. This is the bits of paper side. What I haven’t mentioned so far here is that throughout all of this part I have been working on paperwork, research and meetings with my tutor and second reader.
I handed in a big document which was the beginning of my research into database system and application languages. I then had a meeting with my tutor and second reader to confirm my project is not mad and that i can continue.
Next I am working on research into lots of different current CMS’s and hopefully writing a report on all of that to show my tutor on Tuesday morning. This should then give me a basic set of features i should be putting into my CMS so it actually constitutes a CMS.
So, all fun and games, certainly enough work to be getting on with.
So, server update. I was given another machine and as of last time my plan was to split my application and my database setup to a much more realistic setup.
Under the new setup the old server is just for SQL and as such I have removed anything which would get in the way of this. Now this leave me the new machine to setup as a web-server running PHP. Given in my aim I said I am looking at smaller businesses which need to do the most with the least I planned to make this server Linux based and use the Apache web-server. All of this is free and in theory should be pretty simple to setup.
So first I took the machine apart and stripped out all the hardware it didn’t need. and give me a fairly simple shell. After discovering one of the hard-disk was dead and removing it i got the setup running. Having run all the congif and started the install i started to get packages failing to install. Not pointless ones either, things like glib and glibc. At current it looks like the current install is beyond repair so will require another re-install. Getting closer , it is just taking more time than a) it should and ) I wanted it to.