eric© wrote:
First off, I'm still a Linux n00b...while I've got the basics of Linux down, venturing beyond basic confs and apt-get is still beyond me, and I seem to have found myself in that "beyond me" area. 
 
My ultimate goal is to get Gallery2 running, so that I can gracefully do photos on my webserver.  I have Apache2, mysql-server, php5, and Gallery2 installed (whatever apt-get grabs).  This is on a Debian etch system (installed about a week ago)
 
Should I be not messing with apt-get with all this?  Should I be installing/compiling from source code?
apt-get is the way to go for Apache, mysql, and PHP. 

For actual PHP applications (like Gallery2), I think it's more hit & miss.  I tend to install/upgrade those packages manually.  (Download tarball, unpack in web directory, follow README instructions...)  I find that the modifications made by Debian to get the PHP applications to fit into apt make them harder to understand.  But if you're not really interested in the PHP source of the applications then that's probably a non-issue.

Debian is pretty non-standard with how they set up Apache's configuration files, but you'll need to get the hang of how they do things in order to have smooth upgrades in the future.  Check out /etc/apache2/README for a pretty good explanation of what's going on. 
  1. Take out all the additions you've made to the Apache configuration files.  Any custom stuff you want to do should go in a file in /etc/apache2/conf.d, not in the main config file.  You don't need to add directives to enable PHP, though.  They're already there.  You just need to enable them.
  2. Run 'a2enmod php5' which adds symlinks from /etc/apache2/mods-available/php5* to /etc/apache2/mods-enabled.  'man a2enmod' will explain exactly what's going on, but there's not too much to it.  It might tell you the module is already enabled.  If so, no harm done.
  3. Restart Apache. 'apache2ctl restart'
  4. Check the Apache error log for any problems with restart.  'tail /var/log/apache2/error.log'  You should see a [notice] with a restart message, and the server signature should include PHP.  For example, mine says "[Sun Jan 21 06:27:36 2007] [notice] Apache/2.2.3 (Debian) DAV/2 PHP/5.2.0-8 mod_ssl/2.2.3 OpenSSL/0.9.8c configured -- resuming normal operations"
  5. Post any startup errors you see back to the list.  They will be a big help in determining what's wrong.
  6. Any file with the '.php' extension should now be executed by Apache as a PHP script.  You can test this in any number of ways, but the easiest is probably just to browse the Gallery2 installer script.
Let me know if those instructions aren't clear.  I'll be happy to clarify anything as needed.

alex