I'm going to be spending somewhere between eight and ten hours on a train this coming weekend so I thought I'd setup a development environment on my Powerbook. I didn't particularly want to download all the sources and complie them up so I tried Darwinports. It didn't quite work and to be honest I wasn't surprised - I've put so many different things on the laptop since I've had it that it's in a bit of a mess.
So I looked for something else and came across Apache Friends. Currently they've got a beta version of XAMPP that installs Apache, MySQL, PHP & PEAR, SQLite, Perl, ProFTPD, phpMyAdmin, OpenSSL, GD, Freetype2, libjpeg, libpng, zlib, Ming, Webalizer, mod_perl, eAccelerator, phpSQLiteAdmin. Sounded too good to be true.
The installer has a .sitx extension which needed StuffIt to decompress. The first time I tried to open it, it fired up Excel - see point above about machine being b0rked! Installed Stuffit and it installed like a dream. There's a little website included that acts like a control panel, allowing you to view the phpinfo(), access the mysql php admin screen and try out a couple of demos.
I'm impressed :)
