A. - I agree tis f***king stupid - as if you did not own the equipment -- AND -- its Open Source software that is supposed to be promoting 'freedom'. I guess that exempts the 'freedom' to be root.
You don't need to be logged in as root. 'su' or 'sudo' will also work. These temporarily (for that terminal session) make you 'root'.
B. - for reasons that will probably not be worth discussing, for things to work right, the 'owner' of the /opt/lampp folders should be ' nobody:root '. Its 'your box', and I'm not in favor of a foolish policy, but I will tell you there are many reasons to leave the ownership as it was intended (ditto permissions) that is why it (lampp) is shipped in a tar.gz archive. Hint - 'nobody' is a special user in Linux, OR better yet - open /opt/lampp/lampp (its a bash script) in a programmer's editor, and read the comments, grok the script...
C. -
Warning: World-writable config file '/opt/lampp/etc/my.cnf' is ignored
XAMPP: Couldn't start MySQL!
and phpmyadmin cannot be opened
Wrong permissions on configuration file, should not be world writable!
You DO see why that is, right??? a 'good value' should probably be '644' (that is "standard" for data files in Linux - Owner can Read/Write, everyone else - Read Only)
http://www.onlineconversion.com/html_ch ... ulator.htmGood Luck with your project.