After installing wordpress on my staging Ubuntu server the URL to it is “mydomain/wordpress”. I’d like it to be “mydomain/blog”. Most companies use that convention. will I just have to change the folder name (or rather symbolic link name) leading to where wordpress is installed from “wordpress” to “blog”?
What if I wanted blog.mydomain.com instead? where do I make this change? Apache config?
you need to do it in two steps. go to site-admin-settings-general to change your wordrpess address and site address to yourdomain.com/blog, and then use FTP to change the folder name. this should work.
some domain provider support accessing you subdomain like blog.youdomain.com when you have a folder name blog under the root path.
Simply changing the folder name in FTP or the site URL in Admin>>Settings will break WP.
See various docs: Moving WordPress « WordPress Codex and How to Move WordPress Blog to New Domain or Location » My Digital Life and Changing The Site URL « WordPress Codex
Subdomains depend on the limitations of your hosting account; ask them.
Changing the name of the symlink from wordpress to blog will work.