Struggling with CentOS

Today I was just trying to get Apache working on CentOS 5.3 so I could try compiling php 5.29 and mySQL 5.4 so I could get the mysqli and mysql php extensions.

CentOS comes with apache pre-installed, but unfortunately all the files seem to be in different locations with different names and work differently to what I'm used to.

I was following this guide: How To Set Up Apache2 With mod_fcgid And PHP5 On CentOS 5.2, but after installing mod_fcgid, when I did

chkconfig --levels 235 httpd on
/etc/init.d/httpd restart

I got a message that chkconfig couldn;t do anything to httpd (or something like that) and httpd didn't exist in /etc/init.d (I'm sure it did before I installed mod_fcgid).

Anyway, I found httpd in /usr/sbin, so I created a symlink to it from /etc/init.d (which is itself a symlink). Then when I tried /etc/init.d/httpd restart, it still didn't work. Apparently I needed to do /etc/init.d/httpd -k restart.

Because I wasn't getting very far with getting CentOS set up, and it was quite boring, I actually spent quite a bit of the day organising some of my photos. There I came across an annoying Windows limitation - the max path name length is 255 characters, which isn't enough when organising photos of flora and fauna by taxon. Linux doesn't seem to have this handicap, and from what I've read it seems that Windows doesn't need to have it either, but I didn't see any way round it.

In the evening I watched Springwatch and did some more work trying to get php & mysql on CentOS. I started trying to install mysql, but first got an error about termcap, so I had to yum install libtermcap-devel. Then I got an error about not having g++ installed, so I installed that yum install gcc-c++. Then I got an error, something like

error: redeclaration of C++ built-in type 'bool'

To fix that I just had to re-run ./configure.

I'll have to do some more work on that tomorrow as I'm going to go to bed now.

The weather today was overcast all day, but not very windy.

Food
Breakfast: Bowl of Chocolate crunch oat cereal; cup o' tea.
Lunch: 2x cheese on toasts; bit of iceberg lettuce; cherry tomato; apple; caramel Rocky; cup o' tea.
Dinner: Shepherd's pie; sliced carrots; green beans; tomato ketchup; ground black pepper. Pudding was ginger sponge with golden syrup and custard. Coffee; Oreo.