On Windows, the installation is very accommodating of different locations for the xampp tree. And so I have several different versions of xampp on my PC, and can run any of them easily using the xampp-control.exe from the tree I want to run.
Linux doesn't appear to have any such flexibility in the installation, and I've read somewhere that '/opt/lampp' is hardwired into some of the binaries. Hopefully, I can run the .run file and let it install in /opt/lampp, then rename /opt/lamp/ to /opt/xampp-version-string, and make /opt/lampp a symlink to /opt/xampp/version-string. Is this likely to cause any problems? The one problem I can foresee is just that I will need to be careful to stop xampp and remove the /opt/lampp symlink before running the installer, and then restore the symlink to point to the version I want to run before starting the servers again. I know that it's not recommended for production out-of-the-box, but we've had servers with some security added to the configurations running 24x7 since 2012, and several hundred users that depend on them. We need to upgrade our version of PHP from 5.4 to 5.6, and having both version available on the server and quick to switch in case of trouble is pretty important to us.
Thanks for any tips!