my company has been in the process of migrating several sites it has hosted off of an archaic server onto a newer one with fedora 14

the problem is that fedora 14 has php 5.3 which does not bode well with some of the web scripts that are being migrated (Drupal 5.2, creates quite a few warnings about paramater X should be a reference in function y and ereg() being deprecated)

is there any way to either downgrade php on fedora 14 to 5.2, or preferably install it along side php 5.3 and only using it for those particular web scripts that need it with a .htaccess file?

before you ask or suggest it, no, upgrading the sites to drupal 6 or 7 is not an option, nor is manually re-coding each site to accomodate php5.3
any help would be appreciated, i have tried googling for an answer and haven't had much luck.

your company is fully aware that in 4 to 5 months fedora 14 hits end of life

RHEL5.6 or 6.1( or cent or SL) would be , by far, way better choices .



as to the older php 5.2
add a exclude option to the fedora 14 yum repo file
and build from source
then in 5 months uninstall yum
you will never need it again .

i realize that about f14, unfortunately we didn't have much choice in the matter as we don't physically own the machine we're just renting the unit, although we do have root access to install software on it we can't change the OS (it's not even physically located in our building) if we have to compile php from source that would be a problem and a last resort, is there any solution that doesn't involve compiling?

You can use Ermine (http://magicErmine.com). On any Linux system that has installed PHP 5.2 use it to create self-contained executable. This executable can be copied to another system without need to drag with it any additional shared libraries - everything will be packaged in.

If you are going to try Ermine before you package PHP have a look here: http://magicermine.com/docs/c_packaging.html

Hi,

You can remove the existing php 5.3 or retain it if you want and install 5.2 alongside.

I've faced the similar issue before and i fixed it using the Zend's php installer.

Add a zend repository in /etc/yum.repos.d/ and put the url of zend repository in it.

Follow this link and you are done.

http://files.zend.com/help/Zend-Serv...stallation.htm


Regards,
Sandeep Singh

i ended up being able to remove php5.3 and install php 5.2.17 from source
thanks for the replies though