1and1 Linux VPS

It would appear that 1AND1 Linux VPS come now with Fedora Core 6 - 64bits. I really don't mind except when:
- PEAR isn't installed
- PECL neither (of course) ... and does not work even after fixing PEAR

Some good news though: yum is installed by default. Hooray!

Installing PEAR
Step 1: cd /tmp
Step 2: wget http://pear.php.net/go-pear
Step 3: php go-pear
Step 4: When prompted for the installation prefix, use /usr/share
Step 5: Try-out the pear command: pear

Installing PECL extensions
Getting PECL extensions to compile is a little bit more tricky...
Step 1: yum install gcc
Step 2: yum install php-devel

Even with this effort, I wasn't able to use the pecl command and had to resort to go through the pear command instead. See example next.

Installing PECL / APC
Step 1: pear install pecl/apc
Step 2: cp /usr/lib/php/modules/apc.so /usr/lib64/modules/php/apc.so
Step 3: vi /etc/php.d/apc.ini
Step 4: following step 3, edit apc.ini with extension=apc.so