Xampp public_html folder problem

[godspell]

Hello,

I'm using Xampp 1.7.3a on Ubuntu 10.04 64bit.
For my Uni coursework, I do a lot of HTML, PHP, MySQL and generally speaking, they're all working fine.

But there is one minor issue I wish to resolve:
I created public_html folder under $Home and put all the files I'm developing in there, and then created its shortcut in /opt/lampp/htdocs so I could do http://localhost/$User (just like at my Uni), but it doesn't work! It keeps giving me the following error msg:

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
Thu 30 Dec 2010 07:54:09 GMT
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

I've reinstalled Xampp from the scratch and tried again but doesn't work.

I find this really frustrating because I did the same on my other laptop and it works! There was no problem.

So anybody who knows the workaround, please help me resolve this issue.
I would be greatly appreciated and thankful

Thank you very much.

Regards,
GS

[greno]

This is usually pretty easy to solve.

Whatever file or directory you've symlinked under your DOCUMENT_ROOT area must be readable by the Apache user. If Apache is running as user 'nobody' then 'nobody' needs to be able to read the files or directory.

The only other thing to check is your apache config file and any .htaccess file and make sure that you have not set permissions to Deny on that file or directory.


-Gerry