sources. I've seen few articles, especially about Ubuntu, that compiling is discouraged! Which is very strange, I remember it was encouraged back in late 90's early 2000's. Dmitriy
Compiling is easy see http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:OpenID#cite_note-compile-php-4 if you can add prerequisites if some are missing: ( The following configure works for all extensions I am using )
How to compile PHP (directory names are shown for a standard OpenSUSE server configuration)
1. get the latest PHP version 5.3.x from http://www.php.net 2. make a backup copy of your working php binaries /usr/bin/php and apache module /usr/lib64/apache2-prefork/libphp5.so or /usr/lib64/apache2-worker/libphp5.so . Assign a meaningful name so that you can easily return to your previous version in case that something went wrong during compilation of the new PHP- 3. /./configure --prefix=/usr --datadir=/usr/share/php --mandir=/usr/share/man --bindir=/usr/bin --libdir=/usr/share --includedir=/usr/include --sysconfdir=/etc --with-libdir=lib64 --with-config-file-path=/etc --with-exec-dir=/usr/lib64/php/bin --with-apxs2=/usr/sbin/apxs2-prefork --with-openssl --with-bz2 --with-zlib --with-curl --with-ldap --with-mysql --enable-soap --enable-mbstring --with-xsl --enable-calendar --with-gd --with-iconv --with-pspell --with-gmp --with-mcrypt --enable-zip/ 4. if /configure/ stops prematurely because of missing modules, you need to install missing developers' libraries with header files using YaST. This can be done, usually step-by-step, until /configure/ finishes successfully without missing dependencies. 5. /make/ 6. /make install/