APC 3.0.17 and PHP 5.2.4

It would appear that APC 3.0.17 breaks down with PHP 5.2.4, that's at least my conclusion from upgrading my website's MediaWiki v1.11.0 installation.

PEAR Web Installer

Here is a quick tutorial on how to install PEAR's WEB Frontend installer.

1) Shell command: pear install PEAR_Frontend_WEB
2) Create file pear.php in the desired web directory with the following content:
<br /> require 'PEAR.php';<br /> require 'pearfrontendweb.php';<br />
I suggest putting this file in a separate folder with proper web server access permissions (i.e. htaccess, htpasswd etc.)
3) Adjust directory permissions for the PEAR system folders download and temp (on my LINUX system, these are located in /tmp/pear)
4) Adjust directory permissions for the PEAR classes folder (on my LINUX system, these are located in /usr/share/pear)

PEAR channels updated automatically

A marvelous new tool is available to the general public since yesterday: SproutBuilder. I decided to give it a try:






Above is a sprout automatically updated of all the PHP PEAR channels I know. The list is composed of entries I add to my Del.icio.us links with the tag pear-channel. Then this list is processed through a YAHOO! Pipe and finally embedded in the ''sprout''.

FeedBurner Awareness Data as RSS feed

I grew tired of logging on my FeedBurner account page to get my statistics data so I devised a Yahoo! Pipe to automate things. The Pipe can be used on any publicly accessible FeedBurner feed: here.

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