I fancied doing some database work on the Eee PC so needed a DBMS to play with. Mysql is a very popular database system so would be worth getting installed.

The ASUS dpkg repositories for the eee pc don’t contain mysql server, and I didn’t want to mess around with other repositories. One day I’ll probably install debian on this netbook and then be able to seamlessly install practically anything I want – but for now I’ll just still with binary tar balls.

Checking on the eeeuser.com website and searching for mysql I came across several references to LAMP (Linux Apache Mysql Php) – basically defining a software development stack. I thought this would be a simpler way to get mysql running and have some other tools (namely phpMyAdmin) to boot.

Apachefriends.org have built a lamp distribution called xammp for linux. I downloaded version 1.7 from it from http://www.apachefriends.org/en/xampp-linux.html to /home/user/xampp-linux-1.7.tar.gz. The instructions at the website call for the tar.gz file to be extracted to /opt, but on my eee pc there isn’t much space:

/home/user> df -h
 Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
 rootfs                680M  487M  159M  76% /
 /dev/sda1             680M  487M  159M  76% /
 none                  680M  487M  159M  76% /
 tmpfs                 503M   12K  503M   1% /dev/shm
 tmpfs                 128M  484K  128M   1% /tmp
 /dev/sdb1              15G  1.2G   13G   9% /home
 /dev/sda1             3.1G  2.8G  259M  92% /ro

/opt sits on /dev/sda1 and only has 159M left and the xampp distribution when extracted requires around 210M.

I extracted the downloaded tar.gz file by opening a terminal (Ctrl+Alt+t) and using the command:

tar xvfz xampp-linux-1.7.tar.gz

This command will extract the xampp distribution to directory /home/user/lampp. You can start the mysql and apache servers with the command:

sudo lampp/lampp start

but you will get error messages relating to lampp not being installed in /opt. To remedy this create a symbolic link from /opt to /home/user/lampp with the command:

sudo ln -s /home/user/lampp/ /opt/lampp

You can then launch the servers with:

sudo /opt/lampp/lampp start

You can then point your browser at http://localhost and hopefully see this:

From here you can click on the link to phpMyAdmin to get to some database management tools.