Joomla! is a great open source tool for making great websites with very little effort and absolutely no cost !

I wanted to host a website on my computer and I was really impressed with the features offered by Joomla! I found it to be a pain in the neck to install it on my Fedora 9 desktop though. So, I thought of writing a beginner's review of how to install Joomla! on a linux machine. The key steps in the installation are

1) Login as root

$ su -

2) Installing Apache server, MySQL server and php

$ yum -y install mysql mysql-libs php-mysql mysql-server php-cli php-common php-pdo php-mysql php-ldap httpd php

3) Configuring Apache server

Add following lines to /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf

#**********************************************
ServerName SERVERNAME
NameVirtualHost IP_ADDRESS


DocumentRoot PATH



DocumentRoot PATH
ServerName SERVERNAME

#**********************************************

Replace the bold entries with the appropriate values.

4) Starting Apache and MySQL services

$ service httpd start
$ service mysqld start

5) Make sure to configure firewall to allow http connections to your computer

$ system-config-firewall &
Check the WWW(HTTP) 80/TCP box

6) Joomla Installation

$ mkdir /home/www/
$ cd /home/www/
$ mkdir Joomla
$ cd Joomla
$ untar Joomla 1.5
$ chmod -R 755 /home/www/

Making configuration.php writable
$ touch configuration.php
$ chmod 777 configuration.php

Open firefox (or any other web browser) and type
http://IP_ADDRESS/Joomla/

Complete Installation following page 8 of Joomla! v 1.5 Quick Start Guide written by Kevin Hayne.

$ rm -rf installation/