User:David Gerard
I'm en:user:David Gerard. I'm here to help with the documentation, mostly so I can use it myself (a sysadmin frequently tasked with setting up MW) better. If you want to get in touch with me, go to my English Wikipedia home page.
I release all my contributions to this wiki as Public Domain or equivalent.
Doing this for the good of humanity
[edit]I'm the volunteer sysadmin at http://rationalwiki.org and there's hardly a day I don't regret taking it on. At least the bit where I write on the wiki is fun. I'm effectively the last maintainer standing of user:Nx's custom RW extension Extension:ImageFilter.
Doing this for a living
[edit]I run a pile of intranet MediaWikis at work. Some with custom in-house extensions that the original developer of has long since left. Fun!
For MediaWiki on Ubuntu, I recommend: 1. Install the dependencies. 2. Install from tarball.
Use Leengux, not Solaris. Please. I worry about you.
[edit]Expect the Solaris instructions here to improve. I can summarise my work documentation of MW on Solaris as "You really don't want to do this", and suggest you just use a Linux distro with a decent repository instead. Ubuntu or Debian by preference. CentOS 4.5 is surprisingly not-bad if you get a buttload of stuff from CentosPlus. On RHEL5, hit the IUS Community Project.
I expect using http://opencsw.org - a Linux-style dependency-resolving repository for Solaris, particularly Solaris 10 - would make life way easier, if all you have is a hammer. The work wiki is actually running on a Solaris 10 box, though thankfully I didn't do the original installation. I shudder to think what buckets of rubbish the original sysadmin had to install. By hand from sunfreeware.
etc
[edit]One thing I'm doing on mediawiki.org is to create redirects and pages that just suggest other pages. This is so that typing a word into the "search" box will give a useful result. Again, my motivations are helpful selfishness, i.e. if it'd be more useful for me it'd be more useful for others. Let me know if I do something that appears unhelpful.