Because WordPress is such a popular program, there are tons of resources available. After searching for installing WordPress on Ubuntu Server … I found this page.  I followed all of the instructions, with the two exceptions:

• I did not configure a static IP address for the sandbox server.
• I prefaced all commands with sudo.

 Once this was accomplished,  I ended up with the default installation page at:

192.168.219.212/wordpress/

The first page that comes up is a page which asks for information which will will be written to the wp-config file.   Note that all of the parameters are identical to the ones that were used when setting up the mySQL database in the initial step.

The next page asks for the WordPress site name, and a login password.

About 30 seconds later, you should see a message that WordPress was installed, and that you can now log in with the name and password that you just created in the last screen.  Do that and the familiar WordPress dashboard will come up.  Hooray!

Now that we’re WordPress experts,  I’m looking to get an instance of WordPress up and running to be able to experiment.  I’ve been trying this using VirtualBox on Windows 10.  I wanted to create a virtual web server using the latest Ubuntu server 16.04.

1. Download the .iso file from Ubuntu
2. Create a new virtual machine, “Ubuntu Server 16.04” within VirtuaBox. I gave it 4 gigs of RAM (half of the physical RAM in my workstation), and excepted all defaults for disk size, etc. The only difference afterwards is to change the Network Adapter from NAT to Bridged.

   3. Install Ubuntu. 
   During the Ubuntu installation, choose the option to install a LAMP server. This includes mySQL, the Apache web server, and the PHP language.

4. Once Ubuntu is installed, the server will reboot. You will probably see that there are updates available.  So, to get these run the following commands:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade

5. Figure out your local IP address:

ifconfig

If this address isn’t on your own subnet, then you can change the network specifications for the VM in VirtualBox from NAT to Bridged Adapter, then reboot the VM.

If all is well so far, you should see the Apache default home page when you type in the ip address into your browser.

At this point, we have a working web server running on our virtual machine.  Now we can actually install WordPress.  My first instinct for this was to use the apt-get method to install the files.

sudo apt-get install wordpress

This appeared to work but didn’t yield a running installation. So after searching I used these instructions to get to get a running WordPress installation.