bradgrafelman,
If you have had success in getting PHP to work, that is the most important factor to me, so let's see what your knowledge can do. I am probably overlooking something that is important to do to make PHP work.
To begin with, I have two hard drives in my PC with a dual boot system when I installed Ubuntu Linux. The original drive has Windows XP on it, and the extra drive has the Linux installation on it, and is 120 Gb. The dual boot system works fine as well as the two different operating systems. Since I want to use Linux a lot more of the time than Windows, I strongly prefer being able to get PHP to work on Linux. I have installed Apache, PHP, & MySQL on Windows XP, and am unable to get PHP to work there as well.
I installed PHP on my original Linux installation by downloading php-5.3.5.tar.bz2 (don't remember which website I got it from), then unzipping, and then installing. Apache was installed prior to that, and at first I did not know how to test Apache to see if it was working. I couldn't help but notice that PHP did not work when I embedded it into the HTML as follows:
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html><head>
<?php print "Hello Web!"; ?>
</head>
<body>
<br>
</body></html>
The browser window was blank. I got no error messages or any information to give me a hint as to the cause of the problem. However, when I ran an HTML file with no PHP instructions, it worked fine. For example:
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html><head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"><title>Listing 3.2 A PHP script including HTML</title>
<style type="text/css">
h1 {text-align: center; font-size: 28pt; color: blue;}
p {text-align: left; font-size: 20pt; width: 60%; text-justify: newspaper; color: cyan;}
</style>
</head>
<body>
<h1>Listing 3.2</h1>
<p>Paragraph Test</p>
</body></html>
and displays the h1 header text and the paragraph text with the appropriate colors.
When I saw it wasn't working, I went and bought a book named 'Sams Teach Yourself PHP, MySQL, and Apache' by Julie C. Meloni. and was published in July, 2009 which was the most recent edition. I followed the instructions in that book for configuring PHP, and that did not work. I researched the internet for sites that gave PHP configuration information, and tried a few of those ideas, and they did not work either. In the book, there was a CD that had the Apache, MySQL, & PHP install files, so I uninstalled the programs and re-installed them from the CD. I had the same result after adding the PHP configuration instructions in the book. In the book, and at most every website that I found, the primary file that required additions or changes was the php.ini file. And I discovered that for the different Ubuntu Linux installations, that the php.ini was placed in different folder locations. So between the different Linux installations, there were significant differences.
I began thinking that this was too unreal since I saw no indication on the internet that people were having the problems I was having to get it to work. So I decided to reinstall Linux, which I did. On the original Linux install, I did the manual partitioning, and partitioned the Swap, root, and boot drives. On the installation I have now, I let the install program set up all of the folders. It seemed to run a bit more efficiently. In my research on the internet, someone recommended that one should install the Apache, MySQL, & PHP from the software that came with the Ubuntu Linux install files because they are more stable, and work without the problems one can have from the downloaded versions.
After the new Linux installation, I installed the the Apache and PHP programs via the Synaptic Package Manager, and they installed successfully. At this point, I had accumulated the knowledge from my research to test Apache to be sure it was working properly, and it worked fine. However, PHP still did not work, even after making the recommended changes to the php.ini file. I even found that a PHP Debug software was available, and was called XDebug. I downloaded and installed that, and tried to figure out how to use it, and there was insufficient documentation to enable me to know how to make that software work. I carefully and selectively looked for and marked more of the PHP modules for installation, tried to get PHP to work again, and still had no success.
I have not uninstalled the current Apache and PHP installations, and did not want to install MySQL until I got PHP working. At this point, I'm willing to try anything you suggest. Until then, I'm 'dead in the water'.
Don G
