I recently wrote about trying out Ubuntu 16.04 desktop on my other blog. I don’t really use Ubuntu on my laptop but I like to keep up with updates. However, I do use Ubuntu on a couple of my servers and I thought of upgrading on one of them. I was already using PHP 7 for the application there and I figured that would be the easiest one to get started. Well, it didn’t work out but it was a nice learning experience.
The overall process to install the server on virtual machine and configure it for Drupal development is still valid and you only need to change the OS version from Ubuntu Server 14.04 to the latest one now (Ubuntu Server 14.10 at this time). Also, I have moved on to using vagrant for my setups and will hopefully write a post on that soon.
This guide will explain how to install Ubuntu Server 14.04 on a VirtualBox virtual machine in a detailed step-by-step manner, with screenshots.
I upgraded to Ubuntu 13.10 when it came out hoping that it will all be a smooth upgrade and I wouldn’t have any problems at all. I knew better though, but upgraded anyway. There were hardly any changes at all and at a first glance, it looked that I should get back to work in no time. I realized that it was not to be the following morning.
Installing PHP from packages is very limited if you want more control over the version of PHP you need. For instance, the php5 package on raring release channel (Ubuntu 13.04) currently has PHP 5.4.9. If you need PHP 5.5 for your project, or (more likely) you need PHP 5.3 or even PHP 5.2 for a legacy project, you can’t use the package. It is best to compile PHP to use the version you need.