StarDestroyer.Net BBS

A while back I tried to follow Mike's advice and make sure my database would work on my local machine. Being pretty good with computers, but new to databases, I found that the help files for MySQL and PHP weren't worth the electrons used to display them, and the online communities were a bunch of unhelpful assholes. This is pretty typical faire for UNIX/Linux programs, and is the primary reason why more people don't use them, but I digress.

I ended up giving up without figuring out how to put a database on my local machine, which is a shame because my board is currently FUBAR as a result of moving to a new host. Uploading the database didn't work, so I'd like to test it on my local machine and see if I can't figure out what needs to be done.

So I want to get a phpBB forum running on my hard drive, and I haven't the first clue how to do it. Where do I start?

I suggest contacting Destructionator.

He handles the database for my forum, and I beleive he has it running on his local machine.

Eh? I find PHP and MySQL pretty well documented. If you want poor documentation, look at GTK/GTK#/other GNOME dev stuff . Ugh. Anyway, what do you have set up already? At least a Linux box up?

No Linux box, very little Linux knowledge. That's why the documentation was worthless to me. It assumes you already know the ins and outs of UNIX/Linux programs.

I installed Apache, MySQL, and PHP on a Windows box once, and I found that it was a bitch to make them all work together despite having spent years as a UNIX sysadmin. My advice would be to either look for some kind of automated installer package to install and configure all of them at once (I know such things do exist) or just clear out some space and install Linux as a dual-boot solution. Most linuxes come with all three preinstalled and configured to work together, and if they're not preinstalled, you can click on a few menu options to add them. Mandriva, for example, does not install MySQL by default but you can click on the "package selection" menu when you're installing it and just select MySQL.

Hmm. OK, thanks. The database seems to be working now on the new site, so maybe it's not worth the effort.

I found MySQL relatively easy to install on Windows... The documentation seemed pretty reasonable.

On Linux, it would depend on the distribution I guess. Fedora was easy:
yum install mysql*
In the command line did it, I think. I don't know about other distros though, although I would assume they have similar methods within.