Well, ended up going with ubuntu, spent pretty much the last week trying to figure things out and get it going again. I swear to god, whoever decided to move things from one location to another, but also keep the old file in the old location with settings that are 100% ignored, and makes no mention of having to make those settings elsewhere, should be shot. Took me 3 days to figure out why the absolute **bleep** .htaccess was being ignored with AllowOverride All set in the website config... Oh, no, in Apache2 "we moved that setting to Apache2.conf, but we left the old entry in 000-default.conf because we was too lazy to remove it, heck, we was too lazy to notify you!".
All that aside, the website is back, database migration was a headache as the latest MySQL wasn't in the repository and urgh. That was a fun thing to find out! I swear, people gripe about Windows, but when you sit there and go, "wait, what? why do I have a 6 year old friggen package installed and not the latest?" just because some maintainer or developer hasn't updated a repository since before the release of the OS version you're running... ARGH, anyways, back to life I go. -sneaks back into the shadows-
