Installing MAHOODLE is easy and there is a very good install guide. Btw If we are behind a firewall / proxy and we have separated the application to different machines or VMs in the same sub network it could happen that we can not log in to Mahara from Moodle. We get an apache error like this:
[Sun Aug 25 10:23:12 2013] [warn] [client 192.168.1.2] mod_fcgid: stderr: * log_message("Curl error: 7: couldn't connect to host", 8, true, true) at /var/www/mahara.example.org/docs/lib/errors.php:109, referer: http://moodle.example.org/
192.168.1.2 is the gateway address.
The fact is that our sub network does not have it’s own DNS just a public one so when we try to connect to the Moodle machine we get the public IP address of it. So it tries to connect via XMLRPC across the firewall but that is not allowed of course.
The solution is simple add Moodle to the /etc/hosts file of the Mahara machine.
192.168.1.x moodle.example.org