TYPO3 installation error on WindowsXP using XAMPP

Question

I am setting up TYPO3-Neos on windows XP and stucked here at the following error.

Flow does not support Windows versions older than Windows Vista or Windows Server 2008 (Error #1312463704).

Had a research on internet and read a comment on this website stating "you can't use FLOW3 on Windows XP. FLOW3 uses (stupidly, I'd say) function symlink, that isn't available on Windows XP."

After a little more googling, found here on wikipedia,says that "A third-party driver is available to enable symbolic links on Windows XP".

So is there any real solution to this symlink issue with Windows XP.

Answer 1

Windows XP support was officially dropped with this issue: http://forge.typo3.org/issues/11683.

Even if you make the symlink() PHP command working on your Windows XP, e.g. with third-party libraries, FLOW won't work because the Windows version check is integrated in the bootstrap:

http://forge.typo3.org/projects/package-typo3-flow/repository/revisions/0c539bd6d920ff656531da85fa87619ee7150648/diff/Classes/Core/Bootstrap.php

I would suggest using a Vagrant box with a Linux VM. Thomas Layh prepared a Vagrant box with TYPO3 Flow which can be found on https://github.com/tlayh/vagrant-typo3flow.

A manual is included in the Readme. What the readme doesn't say is that you first need to install VirtualBox for Windows (to be found on https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Downloads). You also have to run "vagrant plugin install vagrant-librarian-chef" after step 2 and skip step 3 on Windows.