Installing PHP on the HP Mini Mi

In this screencast I show how to install and enable the PHP programming language on the HP Mini Mi from the terminal with just 3 commands.

HP's Mobile Internet Experience software is based on Ubuntu Linux, which in turn is a derivative of Debian GNU/Linux, so we can make use of the great Advanced Package Tool (APT) for managing software packages.

Thanks to APT installing, updating, and removing applications are easy and straightforward tasks. To install PHP5 execute the following command from a terminal:

Dependencies (required packages) will be resolved and also installed automatically. Thus, executing the above command will also install the Apache HTTP server, if it was not installed before.

After all required packages were downloaded, extracted and installed, you need to enable the PHP module for Apache by executing:

The above command creates a symbolic link for the PHP module in Apache's enabled modules directory. Then you need to restart the Apache server for so the configuration changes take effect:

PHP5 and Apache are now installed and you are ready to write and execute PHP programs. So the last steps are creating the venerable hello world program in the server root directory /var/www and pointing the browser to http://localhost/ to execute the PHP script and display its output.

Since you need superuser privileges for the tasks outlined above all commands start with the sudo command. To learn how to make the terminal easily accessible, check out my screencast on creating a keyboard shortcut for the terminal.