History: InstallingOnMandrake9_1

Summary: I ran into a few difficulties installing TikiWiki 1.7.3 on Mandrake 9.1. I thought I would document a few of the pitfalls I ran into in case it saves others time. I'm not going to repeat steps covered in the Install Instructions.

Mandrake and MySQL
This problem has nothing to do with TikiWiki, but seems to be a flaw in how Mandrake installs php.

• After TikiWiki install, the first problem I encountered was that TikiWiki could not see my database.
• I checked that Mysql was installed and the permissions were set correctly. This looked fine.
• I made a test php page to see if that could connect to a test database. I kep getting the error message saying "Call to unsupported or undefined function mysql_connect()". PHP couldn't see the MySQL server.
• I discovered that Mandrake has many of the php additions as dynamic modules that are installed as separate rpm files. So I ran "urpmi php-mysql" and it confirmed that this module was already installed.
• I looked in the /etc/php/ folder. There was a file there called "34_mysql.ini" just like there should be.
• I realized there was no php.ini file and then found out that this is also a separate rpm file.
• I ran "urpmi php.ini" which placed the php.ini file in /etc and then tried my test php page again. I was still getting the same error.
• Ran Google searches for a few hours and finally found someone with the solution.
  • Move the php.ini file into /etc/php
  • In the "Paths and Directories" section, set extension_dir = /usr/lib/php/extensions