As most of you know, I have been working on the project to bring the murga forum back to life and in a brand new system. During the process of converting the murga forums database from phpBB2 to phpBB3.3.3 and transfer of the attachments and avatars, an encoding difference appeared and some of the characters in some languages were not translated properly. Though this was rectified by working directly on the mysql tables in the database that everyone is using when going to the oldforum.puppylinux.com, I decided since that work is very close to completed and the forum is up and running in both the new and old that I would try the conversion again from the beginning. An attempt with no pressure and success was not a priority.
So for this all to happen we need a web server that matches the era that phpBB2 and the murga forum ran in to begin the main conversion process. I have always had fantastic results with Tahr-6.0.5 with either Hiawatha or Apache, MySQL or mariaDB, running as a fully featured web server system, and Tahr runs PHP 5+ which the code for phpBB2 AND phpBB 3.0.7pl1 can run together on error free.
The choice was easy to go with Tahr over Xenial but that is for another thread.
I downloaded a Tahr-6.0.5 from the usual place and frugally installed it on a Dell Optiplex 990 sporting a 4 core i3 Intel CPU and 8 gigs of RAM. Next step I set up Tahr with some small customization's, like the wallpaper and the color of the desktop fonts and an upgrade of Palemoon to 32 bit v28.16.0. More is not needed for the specific purpose this Tahr is to perform. (10 minutes)
Step 2 is to build the web server.....so I opened up the PPM and updated it. That worked as expected. Next searched for "Apache" and chose the correct packages and let them install. After some adjustments to the Apache configuration, which I will not go into here, it was ready to go in about another 10 minutes. Went right back to the PPM and searched for "php" which comes up with PHP 5.9 which is in the range we'll need and installed it. I already know the php modules that need to be present and I used the PPM to install those. I configured the PHP, which also the details for that are for another thread in about 15 minutes with all these steps included.
Next went right back to the PPM (never closed it) and searched for "mariadb-server" which pops up and I install that, run the set up scripts and set to go in about 5 minutes.
I have the original murga forum file system and database dump, which I set up in the new web root as "/real-murga" and import the SQL dump into a new database called "murga_test1". Next to this I install phpBB 3.0.7pl1 and set it up. This version of phpBB has a converter tool available that can deal with the many modifications that John Murga made to the original forum to add features that were not present in version 2.0.21 or 2.0.23.Being able to add attachments is a customization that many similar forums of that time did not have, and some others that made the murga Puppy Linux forum more advanced than most. This needs a special tool though, which I found.
So finally it's like midnight in Connecticut and it all looks set up for a conversion run. I start it up.
this morning I push the mouse on the Optiplex and Tahr wakes up with a finished product. All works....but the encoding was translated incorrectly again but that was the test and that can be fixed with the methods I used to repair the production version you all can see.
All in all, it took about 45 minutes to set up from nothing to a complete and fully featured OS and web server and what will really surprise some is how fast the conversion of a forum with 1 million plus posts and 27,000+ registered users can be with this "Toy" called Puppy Linux Tahr 6.0.5