Damn Small Linux Plus XAMPP to Create WordPress Virtual Appliance

Damn Small Linux Plus XAMPP to Create WordPress Virtual Appliance has advantages with a footprint of less than 100MB in size, you can upgrade to Debian later. If you are not aware of the fact that WordPress Virtual Appliance can deliver you all the features of localhost installation, you might find this linked article useful. Damn Small Linux or DSL is a ~50MB distro and perfect to create a handy Virtual Appliance.

Damn Small Linux Plus XAMPP : How Virtual Appliance Works

If you are new to the word Virtual Appliance – there is nothing to fear about. It is practically running an Operating System on any kind of basic Virtualization software like Free VirtualBox and installing Custom components (like XAMPP plus WordPress in our example) and saving it as image file. Please note that, you will have to allocate a disk space to save the image (in our video we have used the option NOT to save any image as it is for test purpose). You can read how How Virtual Appliance Works to understand the theoretical part.

Damn Small Linux Plus XAMPP to Create WordPress Virtual Appliance

The below video shows how to run Damn Small Linux on VirtualBox (on MacBook Pro 15″). Note that the XAMPP installation part has not been shown, that part is written here.

So, first grab the ISO image of Damn Small Linux – its the first step to Damn Small Linux Plus XAMPP to Create WordPress Virtual Appliance. DSL has a GUI :

After this step, you will be able to run DSL like we have shown in our video above. XAMPP for Linux can be found here :

You can run wget command (opening the terminal window) to download XAMPP :

wget http://www.apachefriends.org/download.php?xampp-linux-1.8.1.tar.gz

The above is an EXAMPLE command, please read the instruction on the above given webpage of Apachefriends to get the latest version. Usually the tarball will be found in /home/dsl directory. Change Directory (CD) and we will extract it to opt directory :

You will obviously remove the tarball :

Change the red colored version name with current one. If needed change the extracted directory’s name to lampp (cp command not rm command – rm is to remove not to rename). This command will start XAMPP, chmod -ing solves some issues, otherwise run the second command :

Normally use XAMPP. There is nothing to explain how to use XAMPP to install WordPress. It is basically same like in Windows – you can read if you are a newbie.

But, this setup will require XAMPP to start every-time with that /opt/lampp/lampp start command. That is not great. So run this :

This will make XAMPP to start every-time you start the saved image.