While waiting for approval to join this forum I FINALLY resolved my issue, but decided to post the following in hopes of helping some of the noobies out there like me. Admins, please delete or move thread if this is in the wrong place.
I'm not a programmer or anything like that; so I have worked for an entire week to get osTicket up and running on an Apache 2.4 server running on windows server 2012 with mySQL 8.0.
Like many others here, I was getting "unrecognized charset" and then an authentication error on the initial setup page before finally getting a blank white screen after what appeared to be a successful install up to that point. No matter what I did, I repeatedly got the blank white page that should have displayed the Congratulations page after successful install. I knew it was installing, because it was creating the tables in the db.
I figured it had to be a problem with PHP since none of the simple solutions like modifying execution times and other php code worked. So this morning I referred back to PHP installation documentation. I had already downgraded to an osTicket compatible PHP; from 7.1 down to 5.6 then up to 7.0 and then finally up to 7.0.33 in efforts to force osTicket to install and run, and still, no luck.
The PHP site documentation on a small page there told me that when running PHP 7.0 that one MUST install the x86 version of C++ 2015 Redistributable. There may have been and easier way to resolve this than the steps I took from there, but essentially, I went to control panel and uninstalled ALL versions of C++ Redistributables and then ran the x86 version of Visual Studio Community 2015 Web Installer. After a system reboot, installation was smooth and osTicket works perfectly! The only remaining thing to do was add index.php to the .htaccess file in my web folder. FINALLY! Thanks for a great helpdesk application!
