Installing Mediawiki-1.4.4 on Ubuntu Warty

I installed Mediawiki, the software that runs Wikipedia, on an Ubuntu Warty machine yesterday. I issued an sudo -s command at the start so that I didn’t have to type sudo repeatedly.

To get access to all the different package repositories, I uncommented the warty universe lines in /etc/apt/sources.list and added one line so that I had: deb http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ warty main restricted deb http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ warty universe deb-src http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ warty universe deb ftp://ftp.debian.org/debian sarge main contrib non-free #

Then I installed a load of software: apt-get install apache2-mpm-prefork apache2-prefork-dev libapache2-mod-php4 php4-dev php4-mysql php4-pear

Untar Mediawiki in the default Apache directory: cd /var/www tar xzvf mediawiki-1.4.4.tar.gz

Ubuntu has a mechanism for Apache configuration that I don’t understand. I used the commands below as a quick hack to relocate Mediawiki so that Apache will find it: mv apache2-default/ apache2-default_orig/ mv mediawiki-1.4.4/ apache2-default

Set the MySQL root password: mysqladmin -u root password 'password'

I realized that I don’t really know how to use mysqladmin, so after a few weak attempts, I figured PHPMyAdmin was a better solution. apt-get install phpmyadmin

I used PHPMyAdmin, which showed up at http:///phpmyadmin. At that address, I was able to log in as “root” with my MySQL root password, set above.

Then the standard steps of the Mediawiki installation: chmod a+w config/ mv LocalSettings.php .. chmod ug-w config/ The wiki I am setting up needs to be able to display equations, which requires the texvc extension to Mediawiki. Texvc parses Tex markup and feeds it to ImageMagick, which generates .png files of the equations. I needed gcc to compile the code. apt-get install gcc ocaml imagemagick gs cjk-latex tetex-extra php4-imagick Compile the code: cd /var/www/apache2-default/math/ make Wikimedia’s site on running Mediawiki on Debian was quite useful.