I installed Ubuntu 10.04 on a few servers a while back, and instantly noticed a lot of problems with a few of our sites (that’s usually what happens when you do a major upgrade without reading any release notes!). I fairly quickly found out that the cause was that in Ubuntu 10.04, PHP is now running version 5.3 (it was 5.2 in previous releases).
Unfortunately, PHP 5.3 deprecates a few common features (see here for more info) which causes a lot of sites to just stop working, or act strangely.
I found that the best way to move forward was to downgrade PHP back to 5.2 while we could work out what the problem was with our sites (as is always the case in a fast moving development cycle, this was months ago and we haven’t got around to it yet). I found a really useful step by step guide to do this, and within 10 minutes the server was running 5.2 using the Ubuntu Karmic sources.
The guide can be found at http://mrkandy.wordpress.com/2010/04/16/install-php-5-2-x-in-ubuntu-10-04-lucid/ and I have to give all credit to the writer of that article. None of this was my own work, I just stumbled across the post above and it fixed all my problems (I’m hoping that it’ll help out some of my readers as well).
Anyway, here are the steps. It basically does the following: Remove all PHP packages, pin all PHP packages to karmic, add karmic to sources, and then reinstall the PHP packages which were previously installed.
php_installed=`dpkg -l | grep php| awk '{print $2}' |tr "\n" " "`
# remove all php packge
sudo aptitude purge $php_installed
# use karmic for php pakage
# pin-params: a (archive), c (components), v (version), o (origin) and l (label).
echo -e "Package: php5\nPin: release a=karmic\nPin-Priority: 991\n" | sudo tee /etc/apt/preferences.d/php > /dev/null
apt-cache search php5-|grep php5-|awk '{print "Package:", $1,"\nPin: release a=karmic\nPin-Priority: 991\n"}'|sudo tee -a /etc/apt/preferences.d/php > /dev/null
apt-cache search -n libapache2-mod-php5 |awk '{print "Package:", $1,"\nPin: release a=karmic\nPin-Priority: 991\n"}'| sudo tee -a /etc/apt/preferences.d/php > /dev/null
echo -e "Package: php-pear\nPin: release a=karmic\nPin-Priority: 991\n" | sudo tee -a /etc/apt/preferences.d/php > /dev/null
# add karmic to source list
egrep '(main restricted|universe|multiverse)' /etc/apt/sources.list|grep -v "#"| sed s/lucid/karmic/g | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/karmic.list > /dev/null
# update package database (use apt-get if aptitude crash)
sudo apt-get update
# install php
sudo apt-get install $php_installed
# or sudo aptitude install -t karmic php5-cli php5-cgi //for fcgi
# or sudo apt-get install -t karmic libapache2-mod-php5 //for apache module
sudo aptitude hold `dpkg -l | grep php5| awk '{print $2}' |tr "\n" " "`
#done
And that’s it. As I said previously, all credit should go to the author of this post.
