Ubuntu: Installing cURL? What is cURL?

How to install cURL on your Ubuntu Linux machine:

sudo apt-get install curl

So, what is cURL anyway?

In it's simplest use, you can retrieve data files over the web using URL-style communications.

This includes the HTML code from any web page.

curl www.ExampleWebPageSite.com

But it does much more than that. It will transfer and save files. It can also make requests using a username and password. cURL can communicate through FTP, FTPS, HTTP, HTTPS, TELNET, and other protocols.

One example use is PayPal's API -- thousands of people are performing web-based credit transactions right now using cURL to query PayPal. Data is transmitted securely using cURL.

For more information, you can visit the cURL website.

http://curl.haxx.se/libcurl/c/https.html

If you have curl installed on a Linux system, you can type:

curl --help

Ubuntu: Wordpress MU installation error (localhost.localdomain)

Such a frustrating problem this week.

Trying to set up a Wordpress MU installation on my home Ubuntu Linux server setup.

• Installed LAMP.
• Downloaded Wordpress MU.
• Copied files to Apache root WWW folder. 
  
• Created a MySQL user account.
• Created wordpress database
  
• Granted proper access to new user over wordpress database.
• Went to: localhost
• Got to this error message:

Warning!

Installing to http://localhost/ is not supported. Please use http://localhost.localdomain/ instead.

Looked around and around and around and finally came up with this solution:

> sudo vi /etc/hosts

 Change this line:

127.0.0.1    localhost

to read:

127.0.0.1   localhost    localhost.localdomain

Then you just browse to:

localhost.localdomain

Yeesh.

Ubuntu: PHP mCrypt Installation

mCrypt is an encryption program used on Linux systems.

To install mCrypt for PHP5 on your Ubuntu Linux system:

sudo apt-get install php5-mcrypt

Then restart Apache with:

sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart

I needed to do this so that  phpMyAdmin would have mcrypt available.

For more info about mcrypt, visit:

Official site
http://mcrypt.hellug.gr

PHP usage of mCrypt
http://www.php.net/manual/en/book.mcrypt.php

Ubuntu: Restart Apache

To restart Apache web server on Ubuntu:

sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart