It was the whole week I have been trying to build a local environment for my mobile office, i.e. my laptop. I have referenced several books and looked in the Central Library and Kowloon Library.
Firstly, I followed the directions from Blog Design Solutions by Andy Budd et al. With the book in hand, it took me about an hour to install the Apache2 on my hard disk.
It seemed to be working as the green light was on, so I proceed to intall the PHP following the same direction. It didn’t take too long, only about another 10 minutes.
Then, I need to change the conf and ini files in order to make Apache working with PHP. This is where I was stuck. Dispite many trials it just did not seem to work.
Frustrated, I gave up trying after 4 hours and went to the Central Library in search for a better solution. Which is where I find Beginning PHP 5.3 by Matt Doyle.
I have not heard of WAMP, MAMP and LAMP (respectively the Windows, Mac and Linux version of integrated server set up with Apache, MySQL and PHP) until I read the first few pages of his book. Holy mackeral! You mean I have spent 6 hours today trying to set up my localhost in no avail and there is a one-stop-shop for that?
Armed with the book I went home. First of all, because I was to busywith setting up the server I didn’t even have lunch. So food for the soul is not as important as food for the body. After dinner, I sat down to follow the procedures on the book.
WAMP Bam! Within ten minutes, the WAMP Server on my Windows7 is up.
Thank you, Matt Doyle. Now I now what it means by ‘from here to eternity.’ It’s only ten minutes away if you find the right source.
S. Joseph Chan 