Linux Mint 20.3 Cinnamon
Cinnamon 5.2.7
Kernel 5.4.0-104-generic
Mediawiki versions 1.31.7-1, 1.37.1, and 1.35 are involved in some fashion
Trying to install MediaWiki on a Linux Mint server in order to migrate installations from a different endpoint.
Used apt-get to install mediawiki initially, but the version pulled down was 1.31 - which was too old for the associated database.
Tried upgrading the associated files manually by extracting the latest mediawiki .tar to /var/lib/mediawiki (where apt-get installs things *mostly*), and received various 403 errors.
Copied the .tar contents manually into their "appropriate" destinations (var/lib, etc/, and other directories, as apt-get had dispersed the files across several locations and made symlinks) and this has lead to a "white screen" when accessing Mediawiki, as opposed to the config script.
Have rebooted the server, restarted apache and php services multiple times. No amount of uninstalling mediawiki, deleting all mediawiki files (those copied around manually and/or otherwise generated by the apt-get installation), re-installing, or even manually installing mediawiki from scratch, has resulted in anything other than a white page at this point.
A LocalSettings.php file was never generated for this install - it never got that far. I've tried the various Blank Page fixes - PHP errors will not appear on the page, so far, after I added my backed up LocalSettings.php file to the directory and made the associated PHP changes to display logging.
Any help would be greatly appreciated! I cannot revert to the old endpoint as the package for mediawiki was using Apache 2.2, and neither Apache nor Mediawiki packages will launch any more for reasons I didn't care to investigate further in favor of migrating to a more reliable host (operating system was Synology 7.0.1).