As I’m currently working on NoseRub‘s support for Laconica (an open source micro blogging platform similar to twitter), I had to install it on my local machine.

Here the steps I had to perform to install and configure Laconica 0.6.0 on Debian Linux (thanks to Leslie Michael Orchard for his article Getting Laconica up and running covering the installation of an older version of Laconica):

1. Download the package
2. Unpack it to a folder (e.g. /opt/laconica-0.6.0)
3. Add an entry to /etc/hosts: 127.0.0.1 laconica.localhost localhost
4. Define a virtual host in /etc/apache2/sites-available/default:

   <VirtualHost *:80>
       ServerName laconica.localhost:80
       DocumentRoot /opt/laconica-0.6.0
   </VirtualHost>
   

5. Restart Apache with apache2ctl restart
6. Create the database (if you use a password for your database, you have to add the -p parameter):

   dho@tumulux:/opt/laconica-0.6.0$ mysqladmin -u root create laconica;
   dho@tumulux:/opt/laconica-0.6.0$ mysql -u root laconica < db/laconica.sql
   

7. As I don’t have installed PEAR, I had to manually download the following packages: DB, DB_DataObject, Mail, and Validate
8. From the DB package I had to extract DB.php, from the Mail package Mail.php, from the Validate package Validate.php, and from DB_DataObject DataObject.php. The first three files I had to copy to /opt/laconica-0.6.0/extlib, and the latest file, DataObject.php, to /opt/laconica-0.6.0/extlib/DB
9. In /opt/laconica-0.6.0 rename (or copy) htaccess.sample to .htaccess and change the RewriteBase from “/mublog” to “/”
10. In the same folder rename (or copy) config.php.sample to config.php. In this file the following settings have to be made (also have a look at the other settings):

    $config['site']['name'] = 'The name of your laconica installation';
    $config['site']['server'] = 'laconica.localhost';
    $config['site']['path'] = '';
    $config['site']['fancy'] = true;
    $config['db']['database'] = 'mysql://root@localhost/laconica';
    $config['db']['ini_laconica'] = $config['db']['schema_location'].'/stoica.ini'; // here the part after "ini_" has to be the database name
    

11. Go to http://laconica.localhost and you should have a running Laconica instance :)