XAMPP Apache distribution has a small issue with the starting script on recent Linux installations. The script uses netstat, which is old and is no longer shipped with modern distributions: it has been superseded by ss.

In order to fix the XAMPP 'netstat: command not found' error shown on Linux while starting the XAMPP service, simply edit file /opt/lampp/share/xampp/xampplib and change line 22 from:

  if netstat -an | egrep "[.:]$1 .*LISTEN" > /dev/null

to

  if ss -an | egrep "LISTEN.*[.:]$1" > /dev/null