Live to Local

[BobJam]

I want to get a working copy of my live site onto my local machine (yes, I did it backwards . . . whereas most do it locally at first and then upload to live, I did it the other way around).

My OS is Ubuntu 9.10, and instead of LAMPP (for some reason it didn't work), I did a standalone install of PHP 5.2, Apache2, and MySQL Server version 5.1.37-1ubuntu5.5. So my local root is /var/www.

Apache runs just fine and so does PHP and MySQL. I transferred my live site db to my local machine and believe it or not the privileges are such that it CAN connect to the MySQL server (I got the usual "Cannot connect . . ." at first, but assigned the privileges to that db via phpmyadmin.)

In any case, now I'm sitting on my local machine with a working apache2, PHP, and MySQL, the db from the live site and not much else. Sort of like all dressed up and no place to go.

I did however FTP all my public_html folders and files to the /var/www folder. The live site is Joomla built (1.5.22), but simply transferring the folders and files and also the db to my local machine doesn't do anything but give me the standard apache welcome screen, "It works! This is the default web page for this server. The web server software is running but no content has been added, yet." For some reason the Joomla built content is missing in action.

I really don't know where to go from here. I have no idea what I have to do or even if I can do anything, like modify the configuration.php file from my live site, a copy of which now resides on /var/www.

What I'm thinking about is removing those Joomla folders and files on /var/www and just using Akeeba to backup my live site and installing kickstart.php on my local /var/www and the zipped Akeeba backup and then running kickstart. (Would I remove the apache index.htm file from /var/www, so that only the archived backup and kickstart.php reside on /var/www, and then run kickstart? Do I need to modify the permissions on the /var/www folder for kickstart to work? I DO have the Akeeba and Kickstart manuals and the Akeeba URL).

I'm really lost here . . . I need some kind of a step-by-step guide on where to go from here.

Again, the ultimate goal is to get a working copy of my live site on my local machine, so that I can 'speriment with mods and no longer risk borking the live site. Obviously, included in the scheme would be how to go from local to live when I like the mods and see that they work. Could I do that also with Akeeba?