Xampp for Joomla - Live

[dirpumsd]

I've been looking around at many forums talking about joomla, and xampp and I keep seeing the same simular thing "Use Xampp only for testing servers, not for live sites" I see many security issues (one poster stated that the root pw had to be blank to get lampp to work correctly) and scripts to help with these same issues. My question is: Since joomla suggests using xampp specifically for installing, and since there are so many security concerns with xampp/joomla installs for live sites, is there a better way to install joomla on CentOS 5.5 server? I have this same type of question on both of the other forums as well, but nobody wants to address this. I was able to install joomla on sme but had to pretty much rip out the guts of joomla to get it to work, I'd rather not have to do this for this client.

Thank you in advance,