So I have been given the task of upgrading one of our companies' old websites that is based on 1.5 to something newer (because a second site of ours on the same version just got hacked). I know some php and some other web stuff, but I'd never used Joomla.
I have setup a lamp server on a local VM (ubuntu) for me to test it all out on, then upload the upgraded version as is suggested. My problem now is that I know the permissions are not correct because when I tried installing Akeeba Backup, it kept throwing errors such as "could not copy to /var/www/components and /var/www/administrator etc. I went in and chmod'd those 2 (and then the rest of www because of more errors) to 757 (from 755 for the most part) - which i know at that point might as well be 777. Then when I've tried to use Kickstart to restore from the JPA file I have, it just right away throws an error "could not create j_backup/ folder".
I know this slackening of all permissions on the root folder is wrong, but it was the only way to get it to 'work', which it's not even now, so my question is what did I do wrong in the setup and how do i fix it? I'm not great with Linux, but I'm thinking I have to make PHP owner of www? is that right? or terrible practice?
The other issue I see now is that I just installed the latest php and everything and I see Akeepa says not to use php 5.4... not sure how much of a problem that's going to be.... Some direction would be great because I'm more than a little lost. Thanks!