Notes From Rebuild to Fedora Core 5

I recently rebuilt my linux server using the latest release of Fedora Core (5). There were a number of things that I noted that I wanted to make sure I remember for next time… and maybe they can help you out too.

Apache 2

If you change your DocumentRoot you have to make sure that you give permission to apache to access that new directory. I know it seems obvious but this is 10 minutes I don’t want to waste again.

I left apache’s user/group as apache/apache.
I created a user named wxyz with a group wxyz.
I added the user apache to the wxyz group.
I wanted the web root to be /home/wxyz/web but since the directory /home/wxyz did not have group execute permissions (rwx------) apache was throwing 403′s (Permission Denied).
CHMODing the directory /home/wxyz to rwx--x--- allowed apache to read the directory structure below and bingo.

phpMyAdmin

I had to install the mbstring package in order for phpMyAdmin/MySQL to support utf8 (multibyte strings) character set formats. There was a warning message that was shown in phpMyAdmin.

# yum install php-mbstring

The newest version aparently had some newer dependencies, so php-pdo, php-ldap, php-mysql, php-odbc, php-pdsql, php-mbstring and php were all updated to 5.1.4-1.

Note: yum makes things so simple!

PHP4

Uh Oh, some of my Gallery installs aren’t working with PHP5!
I almost went ahead and downgraded to php4 using this page as reference: http://www.mjmwired.net/resources/mjm-fedora-php4.html
BUT, the newer Gallery versions support php5… so that’s easy! I just upgraded the Gallery version where applicable.

RPM files

Just for reference, to find what files an rpm installed and where try the following:
rpm -qa --filesbypkg | grep PaCkAgEnAmE

NetPBM

NetPBM (yum install netpbm) isn’t installing the binaries I want, like pnmtojpeg etc. Not sure why, so I manually downloaded and placed them in /usr/bin/netpbm (for Gallery1).