There’s one problem, though. The Xampp Control panel won’t start on its own.
The solution, with thanks, is at Human Language Weblog:

If Apache2 or MySQL is already running, then XAMPP will not start. You must stop these applications, if you want to use XAMPP:
sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 stop
sudo /etc/init.d/mysql stop

Then Xampp is happy and starts Apache and MySql.

The Xampp control panel used to work without the above stop commands, ie it worked a few years back, which makes it particularly frustrating, especially when using it a lot.

I’ve searched high up and down in Google, but no solution in sight. Anyone any ideas?

Complicating matters was the fact that every time I tried to download Xampp for Linux, the download would first of all download quickly and then very soon crawl to a halt. I didn’t realise for a while that the the reason terminal couldn’t unpack the file properly was because it was so incomplete.
What to do? I tried several times, before I realised I’d have to rely on wget in terminal.

But I didn’t know how to do that either.

After much searching I found the perfect tutorial: Install XAMPP on Ubuntu on Human Language Weblog (there’s also an How to Install Lamp tutorial on the same Weblog).

Previously I couldn’t figure out what was causing the slow download. The Xampp website redirected me to Sourceforge and that obviously spotted I was in Ireland and so I was marked for download from HEANet.

I’ve noticed that Ubuntu update is very slow too. Is it HEANet, a fault in the download manager, or my serivce provider? I’m not sure.

Anyway, wget ran into the same problems of a slow and disconnecting download, the difference being that it reconnected automatically, and eventually I had my full 54 Mb package, and everything installed without a hitch. and I secured Xampp as per instructions.

Then I realised I’d forgotten how to create a MySql database for WordPress. Fortunately, I found another excellent tutorial How To Create A New SQL Database using phpMyAdmin on My Own Server Personal Web Server Howto. It’s illustrated so you can’t go wrong. In the introduction on the home page the author says he has put many hours into making his tutorials simple, and certainly in this one he’s succeeded admirably.

So now you’ve the database, with username and password. Paste the db name, the username and password into wp-config.sample, save it as wp-config as usual, make sure Xampp is up and running, and type http://localhost/yourubuntuusername/wordpress and WordPress will finish the installation as on the web.

One last thing. If you’re happy with the permalink stucture as it is, well and good, but if you prefer a Custom Structure go to Settings, Permalinks in WordPress, choose your preferred permalink structure, eg
/%postname%/
save changes and paste the generated code into a text editor and save it as .htaccess to your wordpress
folder, /opt/lampp/htdocs/yourubuntuusername/wordpress

There’s lots of things you can do with a .htaccess file, but that’s enough for now