Preparation for Joomla

Now move back to you windows box. You will need a SSH client to allow yourself to login remotely onto your Ubuntu server. I suggest you use Putty, it is an excellent program and it is free as well. In case you have a terminal client you can skip this step.

Open you internet browser and navigate yourself to the Putty download page. Scroll down and select the windows installer file ("A Windows installer for everything except PuTTYtel"). When prompted, click "Save". You can save it wherever you like however I would recommend creating a new folder under your C drive, naming it “joomla-files” and saving the installer in there.

The second thing you need to get is Joomla itself. Go to www.joomla.org and click on the download Joomla icon. Then scroll down, and click on "Download other Joomla 1.5.x packages". On the next page there is a "Files" link on the left column. Click there and then look for the "Joomla_1.5.10-Stable-Full_Package.tar.gz" package (this is the latest build for now). Download it and save it inside the folder you created earlier; this is under the "c:\joomla-files" path.

Now minimize your browser and open the windows explorer. Go to the "joomla-files" directory were your "putty-0.60-installer.exe" and "Joomla_1.5.10-Stable-Full_Package.tar.gz" files reside. Open Putty installer and select Run when/if prompted (depending on your windows version and Service Pack). Click "Next" on all steps you don’t need to change anything. Click "Install" to finish, Putty is an ultra light package and should install in seconds. When done, uncheck the "show read-me text" box and click finish.

Time to start Putty, type in your server’s IP, the one you marked down in a previous step and click "open" at the bottom of the window. Putty will connect to your Ubuntu server requesting your username and password. Feel free to test any commands you like and then minimize the window, we will use it later. Hey, this is important, do not close it just minimize it!

Go to start, programs, putty and click on PSFTP, this time. Log in again. This is a secure FTP program, type in the following commands:

lcd c:/joomla-files

This will change the local transfer directory to "c:\joomla-files", this is the SOURCE path.

cd /tmp/

This will change the remote transfer directory to "/tmp/", this is the TARGET path.

mput *.gz

This instructs SFTP to “multiple put” all files ending with ".gz" from the SOURCE to the TARGET.

Wait while the Joomla package is sent to your server and type "bye" to exit PSFTP. Now back to Putty. You need to type the following commands.

sudo -i

Press ENTER. Type your password and ENTER again. SUDO is a security enhancement found in most *NIX systems. The whole idea is to use the super user account "root" as little as possible.

Ubuntu comes with the root account password "disabled" (root is the super user account, with unlimited privileges). This means you (and any others trying to hack into your system) won't be able to use/steal/guess the root password, cause there isn't any. So, how do you perform administration tasks? The answer is using sudo, running "sudo some_command", will prompt for YOUR password and provided that you type it correctly, will run the some_command as if you were root.

You will need to enter a bunch of root commands to install Joomla. Instead of typing "sudo the_command" all the time, you can start an interactive sudo session by typing "sudo -i". In others words all commands from now on will be run with root privileges. Type:

cd /tmp
ls -l *.gz

You should be able to see the Joomla package you uploaded earlier.

Joomla needs a dedicated database, this is not something you get with the MySQL installation. The following command will create a new database named joomla. Replace stars with the root password you set earlier during the MySQL installation. Do NOT leave a space between the "-p" switch and your password!

mysqladmin -u root -p***** create joomla
cd /var/www
mkdir joomla
cd joomla

Now you need to extract the joomla package. Type:

tar -zxvf /tmp/Joomla_1.5.10-Stable-Full_Package.tar.gz

Watch the files being extracted. Now type:

touch configuration.php
chmod 666 configuration.php

These last two commands create a new empty file named "configuration.php" (touch) and make it world-writable (chmod). This file is needed by the Joomla installer.

Then minimize, do not close, Putty. Now return to your browser. Type in the address bar:

http://<your server’s IP>/joomla