Hello Visvanath,
Thank you for your helpful reply. No, I did not apt-get install Moodle. That method has always failed for me and forces dependencies which conflict with my needs. I have tried both GIT and zip download installations. I did look at your LAMP recommendation and found it an excellent resource however, it does seem to be based on the older Moodle and PHP versions which I have never had any problems with in the past. Having now tried previous versions of Moodle which worked in Debian 6.0 and 7.0 prior to these latest versions I feel certain it must be either the newer version of MySQL or PHP causing the problems here.
I guess the next step will be to start apt pinning to the older versions of PHP and MySQL until I locate the problem?
I do not know why this thought just came to me, having built these on an almost monthly basis and dealt with dependency problems in the past, but would a best practice strategy for building Linux systems to host Moodle be to pin the dependencies to the recommended requirements of the chosen Moodle version. This could make the work easier in the long run but would it be seen as a draw back to the end Linux user using the system?
Thanks,