As some of you might know, I have had severe problems installing Mediawiki 1.3.3 on a Solaris 9 box running Apache.
I have spent the better part of the evening trying to debug this problem, and has made some progress:
1) The first problem was that Php complained it could not find DefaultSettings.php. This arose after I had pressed "Install!" on wiki/config/index.php . In other words the bug was triggered by the Eval($local) at around line 370 in index.php
It started to work when I altered this line in $local from require_once( "DefaultSettings.php" ); to require_once( "includes/DefaultSettings.php" );
It started to work. Somehow it seems like MediaWiki didn't honor the include_path correctly.
2) My second problem is much stranger(!). (But this only happens on a host which in running PHP 4.2.3, on another host with PHP 4.3.8 it doesn't happen.)
I started getting messages of the type: Can't find a writable temp directory for the XHTML template. Check that the TMP environment variable points to a writable directory, or that the default temp dir (/tmp) exists and is writable.
This is probably correct, I have no write access to /tmp, nor is any TMP variable set for PHP to point somewhere else. Is this needed for running MediaWiki?
I traced the error into Parser.php, InitialiseFromUser and the line: $this->mSkin =& $user->getSkin();
When I commented out this line it got all the way through until a MySQL error (which is not related to this at all.)