[Mediawiki-l] Difficulty with changing the alias in Ubuntu 10.04 with mediawiki

[Mike Hutchinson]

> 
> Hi Everybody,
> 
> I have been trying to use the pre-packaged installs for mediawiki on my
new
> ubuntu server and I wanted to abstract away my URL and make it something
> more along the lines of /something_descriptive/page rather than
> /mediawiki/page. In my previous uses of mediawiki I could do this with a
> simple alias; however, the new packages for lucid do not seem to play well
> with this. I installed the lamp-server^ and mediawiki packages via apt-get
> and have standard configurations. The server without modifiction works
fine.
> But if I change the Alias statement in /etc/mediawiki/apache.conf it
breaks
> terribly. For some reason, adding a second Alias statement at the end of
my
> /etc/apcahe2/apache.conf file will work; however, once the page loads the
> displayed URL is still the old style, that is
> "/mediawiki/index.php/Main_Page". I suspect the spaghetti mess of symbolic
> links in this package is making something go awry. I have tried modifying
> the following settings in /etc/mediawiki/LocalSettings.php:
> 
> $wqArticlePath
> $wgScriptPath
> $wgUsePathInfo
> 
> The results of various modifications of these have either been a seemingly
> working redirect from apache to a blank page with now source. Or a
redirect
> loop warning. If anybody could help me get these URLs cleaned up I would
> really appreciate it. Also, I have been trying to find this for some time,
> but is there any place where the ubuntu packages are ACTUALLY
> documented?
> They rarely follow the standard configuration of what they contain
(apache,
> mysql, etc) and the absurd number of symbolic links in many of them makes
> their folder structure almost impossible to navigate around and determine
> which files correspond to the original configuration files of the
software.
> Some package specific documentation resources would really help.
> 
> Thanks guys.
> _______________________________________________

[Michael Hutchinson] 

Hello,

It may have already been suggested, but about the best way to get MediaWiki
on Debian is to manually install it from the source package. There's more
than just one reason to do this, however. Not only do you get to choose the
URL / directory structure that you want, but you also get a much later
version of MediaWiki. Currently Debian 5 will pull in version 1.12 of
MediaWiki, where the current version is 1.15.4.

The Ubuntu 10 guide should work quite well for Debian, though I didn't
bother, I just met the dependencies and installed.

Cheers,
Michael.