Advise Please

griff04

I am a beginner in the PHP arena. I consider my skills average with website design using all the Macromedia products and have also developed several applications in MS ACCESS. I would now like to try MySQL along with PHP. Here is my situtation and maybe someone can tell me which direction I need to take.

I plan on loading Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP (maybe Perl also) on my local machine. Currently have a 60 gig HD and also an extra 20 gig HD I could install if needed. Currently running Windows XP Pro but would like to load Linux to run MySQL and PHP on. I could partition the current 60 gig or install the 20 gig to run on.

I guess my question is which would be the easiest to setup and confiqure to run the MySQL & PHP on, the partitioning of the 60 gig or install the extra 20 gig HD and run all components there?

I also read something somewhere that suggested it would be best to run the MySQL on separate partition than the server is setup on.... So this leads me to think I may come out better installing the extra 20 gig and partionting it to separate the MySQL.

Honestly I don't have a clue which path to take... I know at times confiquring software can be a pain and would like to "just get it right the first time".

I'm hoping someone has been down this road before and can enlightend me somewhat?

Advise Please..or maybe point me to a good tutorial on this matter..

Thanks in advance
RSG

DwarV

if you have a very busy server i would
try what you have described up here.. (servers
on two partitions.) but if you only want
to experiment with mysql php and apache,
you don't need that..

in my place for example, i have a
pentium 75 MHz running
mysql, php apache and linux (text mode 🙂)
on one partition of 2.5GB ... and it works quite fast!

only if you have a heavy load on your server
you should consider about installing on two separate
partitions. you won't notice the differince in an experimental
setup.

griff04

First of all thanks for the speedy reply.

So you are suggesting to partition the current 60 gig, install the components on the new partition which would require a dual-booting service. Is this correct?

Thanks
RSG

DwarV

dual boot is quite difficult to setup...
when i tried linux for the first time, i grabbed a small harddisk, and installed linux on this disk, leaving my current (windows) partitions intact.. i didn't install a bootloader on the primary (windows) disk.. i let my bios boot on HDD2.. foolproof... 🙂

but if you want to install a bootloader... you always have to partition the MBR (or am i wrong?) to install the bootloader..

what i should do (if i had only one computer) is install linux on the 20GB disk
and leaving the partitions on the 60 GB intact.. and then let the bios boot from disk 2..... its the most fail-safe, and the most simple...

BTW: perl, apache mysql, and php come automatically with linux.. 🙂 (for the case you didn't know)