Moodle installation - where to start?

[OverWorked]

Hello,

What's the best (most painless) way to install Moodle?

Should I go with Windows or Linux? (I'm much more of a Microsoft man, but can get around Linux with time).

Should I install a Standard Package, or via CVS? What about the Moodle for Windows?

After a fruitless and disappointing three years with our LA-provided VLE, we've decided to go back to Moodle. The previous one was hosted by a local college. This time I'll be installing and managing it - and I don't know where to start.

Thanks for any suggestions!

[Finch7]

I'm not a big fan of moodle but I used this when asked for moodle...

Windows Web App Gallery - Install an App

It's about as simple as you can get I believe. Especially if you can just throw up a VM to play with.

[glennda]

TBH its fairly straight forward to install, we use it running on Ubuntu 10.04. One of the options when you install Ubuntu is LAMP server, this is everything you need pretty much apart from the odd php mod which is required.

You can then Just copy the install files to /var/www/ and then it should work from there, and browse to the IP of that server.

[tonyd]

If you know your way around a Windows server then I'd stick with that. But I'd stay well clear of XAMPP or anything like that (which is what you get in a packaged moodle install, this is strictly for testing and development, definitely not deployment use!), and go straight down the Microsoft Web Platform Installer route recommended above. This does a very nice, proper, secure, installation of PHP and MySQL for you, and then installs moodle on top of them. All sitting on top of IIS and Windows, and can even be updated using WPI as well. Getting SSO working with AD is much simpler using this route to.

[OverWorked]

Tony,

That's brilliant. I've done plenty of dabbling with Linux web servers in the past, but never got one properly working for production (not securely anyway). I didn't want to go through all that now.

There's a Web Platform Installer with a very recent version of Moodle there now, so I'll try that tomorrow.

SSO with AD is important to us as well, so thanks for mentioning that.

[glennda]

Tony,

That's brilliant. I've done plenty of dabbling with Linux web servers in the past, but never got one properly working for production (not securely anyway). I didn't want to go through all that now.

There's a Web Platform Installer with a very recent version of Moodle there now, so I'll try that tomorrow.

SSO with AD is important to us as well, so thanks for mentioning that.

SSO with linux is the same as SSO with windows. the only thing easier on windows is automatic login i believe as IIS supports out of the box whereas apache doesnt.

EDIT: to clarify i mean SSO meaning using the same username/password not having the ability to login once which automatically logs you into other parts,

[Finch7]

We have authentication working using AD credentials. (They don't need to be re-entered it's all automatic) Fun for spotting students sharing accounts.

[glennda]

We have authentication working using AD credentials. (They don't need to be re-entered it's all automatic) Fun for spotting students sharing accounts.

On windows or linux? By automatic I assume you are using NTLM?

[Finch7]

Windows yes and NTLM yes.

[OverWorked]

@ glennda and Finch7

Thanks very much for your help.

Could you both please have a look at my new thread?

LDAP auth is the bit I'm now stuck on. I've worked through LDAP authentication - MoodleDocs but no joy! I'm missing something obvious somewhere!