Other people’s computers are scary
Published by on April 12th, 2006
I am sat in a basement IT department waiting less than patiently for the Apple OSX Developer Tools installation to download (just another 1hr 37mins to go*) so that I can finish some server tasks.
What I need to do is install some form of image handling capability with PHP - that means either GD or ImageMagick. I tried the latter, as it seemed easier to install, but no luck, it does not work without X11 and that refuses to install. What I now have to do is something that really gives me the willies: I have to recompile PHP to use the GD image manipulation library. If all goes well I’ll have a running webserver, if not, I’ll have nothing but a temporarily useless Xserve… and a very, very late night.
* I should be grateful, when it first started it suggested 9 hours!
UPDATE: The PHP builds went almost perfectly (by that I mean they didn’t break everything!). Now if I can just get GD to handle jpegs, I’m done and dusted.
2 Responses to “Other people’s computers are scary”
April 13th, 2006 at 12:16 am
Hope you escaped safely from the basement. I has been a while since I compiled a PHP install on the Mac, it usually goes ok but I usually have problems with the extentions like GD. I remember trying to put ImageMagick on my hosting package but it didn’t work. Hope you got GD doing jpegs.
April 13th, 2006 at 9:59 am
I escaped, yes, though had to leave the server with GD only handling .png, but at least everything else is behaving itself.
I tried ImageMagick too and although on the surface of it things looked fine, it never worked. On the home environment it’s easy enough to fiddle with Entropy’s install options, but I was very concerned after reading a few reports about OSX Server Admin application not seeing the PHP install after such activity. Scary.
GD went in fine just refused to see the jpeg library. Damn thing. Tried a few options, but still did not work. Back to research.