playing with linux and wiki's again

[mrsbrown]

Last January, I finally got around to reinstalling the wiki software I had before my web server crashed and burnt. Of course, by then there was an update and I installed the newer version.

I got it to look beautiful. I spent a lot of time, adding one thing at a time and making sure that I could see the wiki and there were no errors. Except that it appears I didn't check that it actually worked. It happily goes into the edit page, and I can type stuff in there, but then, when I try to save my words, the old words are back again, in the edit page.

I searched the mailing list for other people who had this problem with no luck. I thought I had some funny permission problem going on, so I asked some people who ought to know, and finally got vonstrassburg to have a look at it. He threw his hands in the air at disgust with the code of the wiki software I chose and suggested I get some different software.

More recently, I've been trying to work out if I can reduce my internet costs and thought I could go onto a plan with a dynamic IP, get rid of the webserver and go with damned_colonial's suggestion of using dreamhost to do what I want, without having to support a linux box I don't have time for.

Alas, my kids are downloading about 30GB a month, so the plan I'm on is about right so the "get rid of electricity consuming, fragile hard disk, linux box that I'm not sure of" option would just cost me more per month.


For $US8 per month, I can find the time to sort out these problems. I thought.

Tonight was another linux frustration evening. I tried to install mediawiki. It has a config page to set it up. That worked. Except I need php5 and the "yum install" options I tried wouldn't work.

So I tried to install an earlier version of mediawiki. The helpful config page worked fine. Until it decided it needed a later version of mysql. And of course, the yum install AND yum upgrade options for mysql didn't work either.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

Thanks for listening, while collecting the links to explain my problem, I solved it.

I've just installed an even older version of mediawiki. One that doesn't need the latest php OR mysql.

And it looks like it works. Hooray!

Comments

[damned-colonial.livejournal.com]

Hey, if you go with dreamhost, be sure to tell them skud@infotrope.net sent you :)

[nephthys-secret.livejournal.com]

I wold highly recommend you talk to Bill (Lord Will & Lady Nadia). He's a linux geek and played quite a bit with wiki stuff. If you offer to cook him dinner he's quite friendly :)

[vonstrassburg.livejournal.com]

To go with PHP 5 and MySQL 5 (later versions) you almost certainly need to upgrade your fedora core. There are a lot of dependencies -- PHP 5 is built against the new Apache and that's built against the new glibc and if you're going to upgrade glibc you have to upgrade everything else so you may as well bring yourself up to fedora 5 or 6 or something.

However there's nothing intrinsically wrong with older versions of mediawiki, and it's a good piece of software.

[sui-001.livejournal.com]

hahahahahahahahaha

*wipes eyes*

that's the funniest thing i've heard in ages. AND i understood it ;)