2.1 beta 4 with php 5.1.6

[douglasjn]

I know that it is not supported but has anyone else tried running 2.1beta4 with drupal 6.4 and php 5.1.6 rather than 5.2.x. The company who hosts our vps has no current plans to upgrade php and I have a years contract with them and other sites on the box.

At the moment I am just really evaluating civicrm and so it is not a mission critical installation.

Just wondering if anyone knows if there are any features of 5.2 which are used in civicrm or if anyone else is in the same boat. I had a look round and couldn't find many sizeable UK based hosting companies who have 5.2.x installed as standard. I am sure this will change over the course of the next year - they seem to wait until at least the .6 release before moving and more and more decent open source software is targetted at 5.2.

Cheers,
Douglas.

[Donald Lobo]

as far as we know, we dont use any 5.2 specific features. (this might change with 5.3 and we might use namespaces, but this still sometime away)

There are a couple of bugs we've tripped on with 5.1.x (or maybe 5.0.x). We recommend 5.2.x since thats what all our servers run (and hence support is easier if we specify the minimum version number)

lobo

[peteralm]

I am in the same boat with webfusion.

Their VPS servers use Ubuntu 6.06LTS which won't upgrade past 5.1.3 - So I'm stuck - I'm contemplating trying to force some sort of upgrade, but there seems to be quite a few dependencies and no working backport...

I suppose, if there are no technical reasons why 5.2 is required then could I just disable the version check?

P

[Donald Lobo]

You can give that a shot. I suspect most things will work quite nicely

lobo

[douglasjn]

Thanks for the replies,

I disabled the version check and it installed fine - I had to change it in the installer script and also in the dependencies for the module which drupal checks in order to activate it.

I haven't come across anything that doesn't work yet! Magento seems to be pushing hosts to update to php5.2 so I expect they will all come in line soon!

I will post any problems I find - just for anyone else who is having the same problems.

Cheers,
Douglas.

[chriswood_ut]

Debian stable is at PHP 5.2.0 so the install script checking for 5.2.1 is too tight.  If you don't need 5.2.1 you may want to think about relaxing the requirement a bit so more default deb/rpm packages will work.

Any tips on what to tweak to get the install to work?  I'm going to have to dig through the install scripts.

[chriswood_ut]

To answer my own question...

File:
sites/all/modules/civicrm/install/index.php

Change Line 233 to:
$this->requirePHPVersion('5.2.0', array("PHP Configuration", "PHP5 installed", null, "PHP version " . phpversion()));

[douglasjn]

As an additional note for drupal users, in order to activate the module in drupal you need to change the civicrm.info file which lists any dependencies that the module has. Change php = 5.2.6 to 5.1.6 or whatever you're chancing it with!

usually located in /sites/all/modules/civicrm/drupal/civicrm.info

Cheers,
Douglas.

[pwyll2x]

I would still advocate for support of PHP 5.1.x    People wishing to use enterprise-level linux distributions such as CentOS don't have access to PHP 5.2 either.  This is becoming more and more an issue as people casually upgrade their minimum requirements.  I'm afraid I've simply not been able to deploy civicrm since this minimum requirement was established. 

[Donald Lobo]

Would be great for the community to step up and provide support for php5.1.x as a patch

i'm pretty sure it will be not be a very big patch.

We dont have the resources or the energy to support multiple versions of php/mysql/joomla/drupal etc

lobo

[Piotr Szotkowski]

I would still advocate for support of PHP 5.1.x    People wishing to use enterprise-level linux distributions such as CentOS don't have access to PHP 5.2 either.

I do feel for CentOS users, but I would definitely call Debian 5.0 and Ubuntu 8.04 LTS Server enterprise-level distributions, and they both ship PHP 5.2 (which was released two-and-a-half years ago, in November 2006).