phpBB • Creating Communities Worldwide
Home of SMF: Free PHP and MySQL forum software
PunBB
There are other free forums but they have slipped my mind. All of the above use MySQL and PHP, and should work fine on Ubuntu once you have everything installed.
Yes, no-ip can be installed on linux. It's quite easy, if you have the instructions.
The Newbie's Guide to the No-IPâ„¢ Linux Client
No-IP acts as a dynamic DNS updater. I'm not sure if you are familiar with this, but here's a quick laymans explanation:
Domain names are simply easy to remember shortcuts to IP addresses (unique numbers that identify stuff on the Internet [servers, computers, routers, etc...]). Most ISPs give you a dynamic, temporary IP address that changes often. Because it would be a pain to keep changing your domain settings to point to your new IP, programmers have come up with dynamic DNS updaters. The No-IP client is one of these updaters. It basically updates your no-ip subdomain each time your IP address changes. So when people type in your no-ip address, they will always reach your current IP address (and not one that has expired).
To install Apache, PHP, and MySQL on Ubuntu, just go to the Add/Remove Applications utility and do a search. You should be able to install them through that quite easily. If it's not listed there, open a console and type the following:
sudo apt-get install mysql-server apache2 php5 php5-mysql libapache2-mod-php5
That should get you started. You will want to look over various wikis to learn how to configure apache and whatnot, since that's a lot of work that I don't want to type here
.
Good luck!