 Hey everybody, this is Brian and welcome to our first LAMP tutorial. What is LAMP? I was mystified by this one day when I was going through ThinkGeek.com and I saw a t-shirt that says I Heart LAMP. I couldn't figure it out at first. Then it dawned on me. Duh. I know exactly what it is. LAMP is an acronym. It stands for Linux, Apache, MySQL, and sometimes Meria Database, and P-HPE, but sometimes Perl or Python. What we're going to be covering in these tutorials is Linux, Apache, MySQL, and P-HPE. Specifically, we're going to be covering how to install and use Ubuntu, and how to use Apache, MySQL, and PHP 5, the newest release. We're going to be doing this using Oracle VirtualBox. If you don't know what any of this is, don't worry, I'm going to go back over this in just a second. But before we continue, I want you to know that you can find the source code for this tutorial and all other tutorials out on my website, www.voidrealms.com. I know many of you watching this have probably already seen some of my C++ cross-platform programming tutorials with Qt. Don't worry. I'm going to make more of those. I promise I will. All right. So let's back up here. LAMP. Why LAMP? Well, there's a ton of software out there. I mean, you've got Microsoft, you've got Oracle, you've got Norvel. It's Norvel even around anymore. Somebody messaged me and let me know if Norvel is still a company or if they went belly up. Anyways, point being, all these things cost money, money that you worked your butt off for. So why would you spend money when all this stuff is free? You see right here, LAMP is a solution stack of free open source software. That's right, free. Everything that I'm going to show you in this tutorial series will not cost you a dime and I'm going to try and stay as cross-platform as humanly possible so it doesn't matter if you're on Windows or Linux or Unix or Mac. What we're going to be doing, LAMP, in case you haven't figured it out this far, is we're going to be building websites. Now these tutorials will be criticized as being a mile wide and an inch deep. What that means is while we're going to download and use Ubuntu, you're not going to be an Ubuntu or a Linux expert by the time we're done with these. Same thing for Apache, same thing for MySQL. We are however going to be spending the bulk of our time working with PHP and MySQL. We're going to use VirtualBox from virtualbox.org and this is an Oracle product. And what virtualization allows you to do in case you've never heard of it, is allows you to run a computer inside of a computer. So what that means to you is if you're currently running Windows and you look at my screen and say, oh great, he's running Linux, I can't do any of these, wrong. VirtualBox runs on Windows. So you can run a Linux server inside of Windows while you're in Windows, just like you would run a normal app like Firefox or Microsoft Word or dare say, Internet Explorer. What we're going to do is we're going to download Ubuntu and just get the desktop. Don't worry about the server. Get the latest version. And that says 12.10, but if you don't donate, I think it dumps you down to 12.4, long-term support. Yep, see, it'll say 12.4. Anyways, I've already downloaded it. I just wanted to walk you through how to do that. So what is Ubuntu? Well, Ubuntu, I think it's an African word. Means we are all one or we all connected. It's something spiritual along those lines. I'm sorry if I'm horribly offending some of you Ubuntu fanatics out there. But Ubuntu is one of the easiest and fastest, I shouldn't say the fastest. It's to use and fastest to get started with Linux desktop environments. They also make servers, et cetera, et cetera. Now, what is Linux? Well, Linux is a very robust operating system. It's free, dirt-free. You don't have to pay a dime for it. Trust me, it's worth a look. Now, why is LAMP so popular? Think about it. You want to build a website, something that you can make millions of dollars off of, and it doesn't cost you a dime. The issue is your time downloading and learning. Ubuntu is very popular. It's probably one of the most popular distributions out there. But I know there's Fedora and Mint, and there's so many distributions of Linux, it's mind-boggling. And I know I'm going to get hate mail and fan mail for saying, or not saying the distribution name of your favorite distribution. But for these tutorials, we are going to use Ubuntu because I feel it is very user-friendly. Some people hate the Unity desktop, but deal with it. You can try it online. You can throw it on a USB stick. You can run it alongside Windows, and you can actually download it and do a virtual machine, which is what we're going to do. So to kick these tutorials off, go ahead and download Ubuntu. Just go to ubuntu.com, home, get started, follow directions on the screen, desktop, et cetera, et cetera. You know what to do. And also grab yourself a copy of a virtual box, virtualbox.org. Just go to downloads, select the correct one for you. And download and install. Now, once you get those installed, we will carry on with our tutorials. This is the first out of many. I thank you for watching. I hope you found this educational and entertaining. And thank you for watching.