Apache Friends Support Forum

Hi,

I just installed xampp and after switching around some file permissions, I found that I am no longer able to load my localhost/.

Instead, I am getting: Access forbidden!

You don't have permission to access the requested object. It is either read-protected or not readable by the server.

If you think this is a server error, please contact the webmaster.

Error 403

localhost
Mon 09 Aug 2010 09:45:32 PM EDT
Apache/2.2.14 (Unix) DAV/2 mod_ssl/2.2.14 OpenSSL/0.9.8l PHP/5.3.1 mod_apreq2-20090110/2.7.1 mod_perl/2.0.4 Perl/v5.10.1

Does anyone know what is wrong? It's probably something simple, so I apologize if it's a very newbie question (I just switched over from windows to Ubuntu so I'm still getting used to the Linux environment).

by default, ubuntu does not give you (the user) read/write permissions for directories above your home directory (for example, /opt/xampp, the directory xampp is typically installed to).

you need to change file and directory permissions for that directory and all its files/ subdirectories. Be careful with this - you can create security problems. Read up here.