Total Newbie seeks help on basics for installing to local machine

Dear all,

Lovely to read through the threads here and see such a great community sharing info :smile:

I am completely and utterly new to the Zen Cart System and installing this is probably my biggest endeavour so far in using computers. I have the Zen Cart manual and am working my way through it with regards to the installation, but being so new to some of the lingo I am a bit stuck! Appreciate any help you can offer.

With regard to the Manual I am at page 37, having already installed XAMPP successfully. Everything has gone well with regards to the steps in the manual so far but now I am up to the section titled "Setting up a local domain" and I have a bit of a block about what I actually do with regards to some of the instructions, even though I realise its probably pretty basic :blush:!

The instructions I am having the difficulty with are:

**To set up a domain in Windows XP:

1 .Edit the file C:\WINDOWS\systems32\drivers\etc\hosts with a text editor. Change the drive letter (C:) to match your own computer setup.

2. Add the following lines to the end of the file -

127.0.0.1 https://www.example.com # For browser access
127.0.0.1 mail.example.com # For email access
127.0.0.1 example.com # For mercury mail server

3. Remember to save the contents of the file.**

With regards to these steps, could anyone advise me how I do this exactly and where I perform this? I haven't edited a file before or used a text editor (at least I dont think so :P). I do have a website name organised so I understand I will be replacing that with the 'example' etc.

Very much appreciate a kind mentor to nudge me along, thanks all,

Melinda

Hi goddessdancing,

For this small change you can use Windows NotePad to open up the respective files and make the necessary changes before saving them as what you would do for any files on Windows.

If you need to edit PHP or HTML files further down the road, you can refer to Appendix A on pg 379 to choose an appropriate Text Editor.

I hope it's ok to add on to this thread........
I'm on page 37 of THE BOOK :)
I edit the hosts file (like stated in first post above)
when I try to save the file I get the following:

Cannot create the C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc\hosts file.
Make sure that the path and file name are correct.

Am I having another glitch with Vista?? Any suggestions would be appreciated!

Thank You

This is an issue with Windows Vista.

You can solve the problem by following the instructions in this article.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/923947

Many Many Thanks!! :D Keep up the good work!:D