I just installed the latest Debian, and realized that the packages are not as up-to-date as I would like. For example I installed PHP and MySQL. PHP was at version 5.2.6 and MySQL was at version 5.0.15a. Considering PHP 5.2.11 and MySQL 5.1 are already released, made me think am I better off compiling from source?

After going down the compiling route, as in my previous post due to the same out dated problems I actually found a useful and up-to-date repository. Along with this, my bias towards Debian drastically strengthed. Which after many years of working on a a variety of other distro’s never quiet happened.

Setting up and configuring Debian

The initial setup comprises of two steps, the first step is to configure the locales, the second is to add new repos to your sources.list file.

Set the Locale

On a fresh install, anytime you need to use apt-get for anything Debian always complains about ‘setting the locale failed’ like below:

perl: warning: Setting locale failed.
perl: warning: Please check that your locale settings:
LANGUAGE = "en",
LC_ALL = (unset),
LANG = "en"
are supported and installed on your system.
perl: warning: Falling back to the standard locale ("C").
perl: warning: Setting locale failed.
perl: warning: Please check that your locale settings:
LANGUAGE = "en",
LC_ALL = (unset),
LANG = "en"
are supported and installed on your system.
perl: warning: Falling back to the standard locale ("C").
perl: warning: Setting locale failed.
perl: warning: Please check that your locale settings:
LANGUAGE = "en",
LC_ALL = (unset),
LANG = "en"
are supported and installed on your system.
perl: warning: Falling back to the standard locale ("C").

To set the locale you need to run:

sudo locale-gen
sudo dpkg-reconfigure locales

After running the second command, you will be asked to first configure which locales you want, and then to select a default one. After that your done.

Installing PHP and MySQL on Debian

Using dotbeb’s repository add the following to your /etc/apt/sources.list

deb http://packages.dotdeb.org stable all
deb-src http://packages.dotdeb.org stable all

After which you must run

apt-get update

Finally, install PHP and MySQL:

apt-get install php5-cgi php5-mysql php5-curl php5-gd php5-idn php-pear php5-imagick php5-imap php5-mcrypt php5-memcache  php5-mhash php5-ming php5-pspell php5-recode php5-snmp php5-sqlite php5-tidy php5-xmlrpc mysql-server mysql-client nginx

Resources:

• dodeb

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 3rd, 2009 at 15:58 and is filed under Linux, Sys Admin, debian. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.