New subject: [Mediawiki-l] Some progress on installing 1.3.3

13 Sep 2004

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.)

-- 
Regards
Johan Seland