Well, the longstanding diatribes against Ubuntu not withstanding, I have spent a fair amount of time on this in the past few weeks. To such an extent that when I came back to the SuSE machine (which I am using for this), I had pretty much lost the ability to do anything.

The shame will never end.

In short, the SuSEbox has been largely untouched for the last month or so, so when I came to it today it needed a fair amount of admin doing – packages updating etc. I also decided this was a good time to bin the old apache 1.3 it was running and install apache 2 with php5.

What a mistake.

In the last month or so, it seems like I had forgotten how to do the simplest of admin tasks. I couldnt add new repositories to download up-to date software and had to resort to installing (often followed by repeated uninstall, reinstall farces) the software from a CD burned months ago. It was a nightmare.

Fortunately the wonders of Google saved the day and I got to http://www.linuxquestions.org/ – which fortunately had pretty much the answer to every question I was suffering.

Sadly, for some reason (and even though CF, MySQL, Perl, Ruby, Python etc are all fine) I cant get apache to serve PHP pages properly. It still sends them with an unknown mime-type. (And yes, I have edited the config files by hand…)

Oh well.