Mambo is designed and developed to support Apache, but it may work without any problems on IIS and other server types and clients. Since Apache is the preferred server, this article will only mention Apache.
The operating system Apache is installed on can be anything that the Apache platform supports, but it is Linux, Mac OS X, Windows 2000/XP and BSD that have been fully tested with Mambo. Unix/Linux based systems are recommended for security and performance reasons.
Apache 1.13.19 or later (2.0.55 recommended)
PHP will need to be installed and configured to run either as an Apache module or under CGI. The MySQL and zlib modules must also be installed into PHP. There are a lot of guides telling you how to do this, just use your favourite search engine to locate the information you need.
PHP also needs to have a writable session save path. This is configured in the php.ini-file with the line session.save_path = /path. PHP needs to have full access to the folder specified here. On a windows system, this path will be something like session.save_path = C:\Program Files\Something, while a unix system has the session.save_path = /home/var/www-system.
For security, it is advisable to use PHP 4.4.x versions or higher.
See here for information about running Mambo on Windows IIS
The final ingredient is the MySQL database server. Mambo has been tested on MySQL 4.x and 5.x versions. At this time, Mambo does not run in Strict Mode on MySQL 5.x.
NOTE: Most web hosts already have PHP and MySQL set up. Your host should be able to tell you if zlib is installed and how to find the path to save your sessions.
You should ALWAYS download Mambo direct from the source. Some Mambo fan sites offer downloads, but to ensure that you are getting an official release, without unauthorised modifications, please make sure you download from http://sourceforge.net/projects/mambo