The Site With the Lamp

August 15, 2008

Another side effect of using the unstable repo to install FF3 was that it messed up my apache. Debian does advice against using the unstable repo. That means it really isn't suited for anyone who wants to use the latest version of any software. There is a long gap between Debian releases and at that rate we will have to wait forever to see FF3 make it's way into the stable repository. That means there is no choice but to go with the unstable option.

I sorted out the apache issue by uninstalling and reinstalling it. Things went smoothly for a couple of days, until I needed to run an old PHP script. The script is nothing special it just does a bit of XSL transformation. It makes use of the PHP XSLT extension. The trouble is that is not part of debian!!

There is a PHP4-XSLT module and there is a PHP5-XSL module but no PHP5-XSLT how anoying. Once upon a long ago, I quite used to enjoy compiling things from source but now I am too old forit. Nevertheless it seems that I have no choice but to manually compile PHP5. I didn't get far - the PHP configuration script came up with this ridiculous statement

checking whether the C compiler (gcc  ) works... no
configure: error: installation or configuration problem: C compiler cannot create executables.

Turns out this is because libc6-dev is not installed. That is easily rectified but while installing libc6-dev, apt decided to uninstall xorg? how ridiculous is that. Looks like I will be limited to the terminal next time I reboot the machine.

But when I tried to compile PHP again, I ran into the same error once more. Close inspection reveals that APT had choked out with

Failed to fetch http://ftp2.jp.debian.org/debian/pool/main/g/glibc/libc6-dev_2.7-12_i386.deb

How anoying is that? when Fedora 10 is released, I am definitely switching back.