I have installed Turnkey Linux on a dedicated server machine. The installation is standard based on Debian Wheezy (i.e. the latest version). My main purpose is to use the machine as a development server for Joomla. However, I have a very strange problem with most Joomla installations. Although the sample version 3 installation from the Joomla site works ok, a number of other installations don't.

Behaviour is as follows: I can access the back end (administrator area) and all settings are visible; content (articles, etc.) appears and can be edited. No errors are given when saving changes. However, when I try to open the site (front end) I get a blank screen, or one with just the name of the template.

The strange thing is, when I copy the files and database from the Lamp server to a Wamp server, the site displays normally. (The entire site is transferred to the Wamp server without making any changes either to the database or to the files. Database transferred by exporting and importing through phpmyadmin.)

Notes:

The behaviour is the same for templates from two different template suppliers. I installed the sample data in all cases.

Before running the Joomla setup, I changed the ownership of all files and directories to www-data:www-data. I changed directory and file permissions to 755 (I also tried 755 for directories and 644 for files).

I have tried to keep the installation as standard as possible.

Although I know Windows well, I am new to Linux. I can't figure out if its an issue of permissions, of settings for apache/php/mysql or what. It's a mystery, but very frustrating!

Any help will be much appreciated! Thanks!

Bruce

Update: Wed 15 Jan

I have solved the problem - by installing a gd library for php. Hope this can help others with the same problem. Perhaps TKL can consider adding that library to the standard TKL appliance.