I regularly set up virtualbox ubuntu setups to run as local webservers. I have set these up several times and never had an issue. Recently I have been cloning them but wanted to do a fresh install this time in the hopes of fixing some niggling problems which have propagated through my setups.

However, something has changed:

1)vb guest additions no longer allow me to copy and paste (i'll worry about that later) 2)more importantly phpmyadmin no longer works as installed - Initially going to localhost/phpmyadmin gave a message that the page could not be found. So I have followed some instructions (sorry I know its vague I cant find them now) which have created a phpmyadmin directory in /var/www but now I get an error saying: the mysqli extension is missing.

If I run phpinfo mysql and mysqli are listed.

All I have done so far is install apache2 (working) install php5 (which I think used to come with apache) Install mysql server (and client for good measure)

and install phpmyadmin

I found a post of a similar question which suggested I should install php5-mysql (done) and edit php.ini and uncomment the line extension-mysqli.so - this is not there, so I tried adding it with no joy. I have restarted apache and still no joy on phpmyadmin.

Any help is much appreciated as this is driving me nuts. Why the change for the worse - I was just starting to like linux!

I'm running a windows 7 machine and the guest os is ubuntu 12.04 - I ran apt-get update before doing anything so all packages should be the latest versions.