Installing Joomla is a essentially a three-stage process: prepare a database in MySQL (or one of the other databases), download and uncompress the files for the CMS into a separate directory within your Web server's folders, then step through a Web-based installation that completes the job.
For this article, I used a straightforward LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP) server, as plain vanilla as I could create on an openSUSE 12.2 machine. Specifically, I installed Apache 2, MySQL 5.5 and PHP 5; a MySQL module for PHP was also installed. It is important to have FTP server software installed on the same machine, since Joomla needs FTP to upload and install add-ons such as plug-ins, extensions and themes.
read more