Setting Up A Local W3C Markup Validator on Mandriva Linux One 2009

Philip C. Paradis
philip.paradis@classhelper.org
Revised: January 25, 2009

1. Introduction and Motivation
2. Installing Mandriva Linux One 2009
3. Initial System Configuration
4. Installing Mandriva System Updates
5. Setting Up Networking
6. Setting Up Services
7. Configuring Mandriva's Firewall
8. Installing Required Packages
9. Installing the W3C Validator

Introduction and Motivation

Millions of web developers around the world have used the online HTML/XHTML validation tool maintained by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) to check their page markup and correct problems. While the publicly hosted version of this tools is of immense value to the development community, many developers might want to run it on a local network server. By running the validator locally, web developers are able to validate internally developed content, such as development versions of public-facing websites or intranet systems that are for private use.

Fortunately, the W3C freely distributes the source code for its validation tools. In this tutorial, we're going to use the Mandriva One 2009 GNU/Linux operating system to set up a standalone markup validation server. Mandriva doesn't require a lot of system resources; an unused older computer with at least 256 MB of RAM (512 MB is recommended) and a 5 GB hard drive may be used as a server in this case. In my case, I installed the server as a VMware Server guest running on a box that hosts several virtual private servers on my home development network. You could just as easily apply these instructions to a Sun xVM VirtualBox environment, as long as you specify bridged networking for the virtual machine. It will need to be on the same network segment as your development systems, unless you set up a router to connect multiple network segments.

Even if you've never set up a Linux-based server before, you can follow these simple instructions to get up and running quickly. In our next section, we'll get started with the base Mandriva Linux 2009 operating system installation on your server. If you're already comfortable with Mandriva installation, you can skip ahead to Mandriva initial configuration instead.

Continue: Installing Mandriva Linux One 2009