Damn Small Linux with XAMPP Linux to create a webserver on a P4 machine or Mele A2000

Question

A couple of days I'am busy to figure out to create a powerful light weight server that can be used as webserver to serve some simple sites that using PHP and mod-rewrite.

The P4-box (actually a laptop, dell latitude c640) i'm using came with windows XP Prof. The problem is that windows consumes more memory and has some TCP/IP stack problems (it is limited) because it can only serve up to 10 (and 40 with a hack) connections a time.

Before this have also bought a Mele A2000 ARM device (china thingy) that comes with Android 4.0, a nice little box that is quiet and is power friendly, just 5 watts. On this device I also tried several things but doens't get ARM linux on it and all software solutions on Android uses Lighttpd which does not support mod rewrite like Apache.

So i start searching the net for a linux distro for the P4-box and found many, to figure out what is the best, it is very difficult for me because of my Windows background (don't want a headless system). Tried several ones and then I found Damn Small Linux (or DSL), looks great and works okay on a very small footprint. Exactly what i'm looking for.

Then I search on DSL+Apache+PHP+mySQL and found the XAMPP Linux version (I use also XAMPP on Windows to test websites, and found a blog that XAMPP must be working on DSL). I found only information how to do it but there is no iso or disk image around with these two worlds combined (at least i didn't find it).

I tried to setup a diskimage (2GB) with use of VMWare, that is working great. The idea is to first try it in VMWare and after that convert the disk to a physical disc without damaging systems or hardware. I have used the DSL install to setup a debian installation (the "install to harddrive" option in the tools menu. Reboot and works okay.

After this i downloaded XAMPP Linux (http://www.apachefriends.org/en/xampp-linux.html) and follow the instructions on this page. Installed it as superuser but get errors at the install, one about SQL (something with syntax error in a command-line utility) and one error the end (something I didn't understand) but install proceeds and completes.

Then I tried to run 'lampp' or 'xampp' and the only thing I see is floating point exceptions (see image) and doesn't look ok.

In short, my questions are:

• Is there a DSL+XAMPP image around that I can use (can make my life much easier ;-))
• If not, what i'm doing wrong (is it really possible or is there something wrong with the latest version of both?)
• Is there a lightweight distro with XAMPP installed or PHP+Apache+mod_rewrite+mySQL available? ARM or x86?
• Or is it better to take my hands of this and try to figure out to hack windows stack to get more connections
• Or do you have other suggestions?

Solution 1

Though a little late, but sounds like "Lamppix" and "Lamppix Mini" is very appropriate for your purposes :

Lamppix is a Linux Live CD based on Knoppix and Damn Small Linux. It includes Apache, MySQL, > PostgreSQL,PHP, Perl. That means, it includes XAMPP plus PostgreSQL.

Everything is pre-configured, so you can simply insert the CD, reboot and enjoy a running webserver.

You can include your own PHP scripts and they'll run right off the CD. You can even include complete Content Management Systems (CMS) like Typo3 or Mambo to work with them.

Solution 2

DSL is debian based so you can add the Debian or Ubuntu repos, and then then just do the normal stuff.

sudo apt-get update <--- after added the repos
sudo apt-get install apache2
sudo apt-get install mysql-client mysql-server
sudo apt-get install php5 

You can add the extensions that you need.