After installing Linux Mint, these are the things you may want to keep it up to date and configured properly.

Get Updates

Open Update Manager by clicking on the shield icon on the bottom right-hand corner (see inset) and click on the Install Updates button.

Or from the terminal run the following command:

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade

Set UTF-8 Locale

Open Terminal and type in this command:

ls /usr/lib/locale

You will see this result.

# ls /usr/lib/locale/
C.UTF-8  locale-archive

Now, type in the following command:

sudo locale-gen --purge --no-archive

# ls /usr/lib/locale/
C.UTF-8     de_LI.utf8  en_CA.utf8  en_IN       en_US.utf8
de_AT.utf8  de_LU.utf8  en_DK.utf8  en_NG       en_ZA.utf8
de_BE.utf8  en_AG       en_GB.utf8  en_NZ.utf8  en_ZM
de_CH.utf8  en_AU.utf8  en_HK.utf8  en_PH.utf8  en_ZW.utf8
de_DE.utf8  en_BW.utf8  en_IE.utf8  en_SG.utf8

Further Reading

How-to fix “Warning: No support for locale: en_US.utf”

This setup is intended for those who need to get their system up and running to do PHP web development. It is not recommended for production websites.

Install Apache

Open Terminal and type:

sudo apt-get install apache2

At the end of installation you will see a message saying:

* Starting web server apache2
apache2: Could not reliably determine the server's fully qualified domain name, using 127.0.1.1 for ServerName


It’s nothing to worry about because most personal computers don’t have one.

Test Apache

Open a web browser and point it to URL:

http://localhost/

You should see a message saying:

It works!
This is the default web page for this server.
The web server software is running but no content has been added, yet.

Install PHP

Open up Terminal again and type in the following command:

sudo apt-get install php5 libapache2-mod-php5

Test PHP

In the terminal, type this command:

sudo pluma /var/www/test.php

This will create a new php file in Pluma text editor. Copy/Paste this line into the .php file.

<?php phpinfo(); ?>

Save and close the file.

From a web browser, try to load the file:

http://localhost/test.php

It should render a page with all information on the PHP installation.

Install MySQL

Still in the Terminal, type this command:

sudo apt-get install mysql-server

You will be prompted with Configuring mysql-server dialog to setup a root password. It’s recommended that you set a password.

Install phpMyAdmin

sudo apt-get install libapache2-mod-auth-mysql php5-mysql phpmyadmin

In Configuring phpmyadmin window, press spacebar to check apache2 and press TAB key to move to and press Enter.

Choose when asked to configure database for phpmyadmin with dbconfig-common.

Test phpMyAdmin

From the browser, open this address:

http://localhost/phpmyadmin

You should see phpMyAdmin’s login page and be able to login using ‘root’ as Username and the password you setup earlier when you installed MySQL.

Further Reading

Installing LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP) On Linux Mint