Just played around with an extension for the MediaWiki wiki. Collection is the name of the devil :-). Installing was no problem but in the end when I requested the first .pdf I only got back a beautiful shiny white site. Of course some HTML tags were included, but no sign of the expected .pdf file. Hmm,… so I started my investigations.

The server OS is an Ubuntu Karmic with PHP 5.2.x and apache 2.2.x ……..

After an hour I found out that a bug/feature seems to prevent the wm-server to give back the generated lr =>pdf files. The NET suggest,… upgrade to PHP 5.3.  So if you have no clue, do what the NET suggests. But Ubuntu Karmic does not have PHP 5.3 as packages available. So, what to do…. I always wanted to do a dist-upgrade on an live system :-).

No sooner said than done! I fired up the upgrade.

 aptitude update
 aptitude install dpkg aptitude get
 aptitude install dpkg aptitude aptaptitude install dpkg aptitude apt
 aptitude safe-upgrade

…did do the trick. And you would not believe it, the MediaWiki extension started to work, and I got a new shiny Ubuntu Lucidy 10.04 LTS.

The story goes on.  The main webpage is powerd by a recent version of Typo3 and for some reason some Typo-Code is using functions which are marked as deprecated in PHP5.3.  A nice deprecated warning was now replacing our beautiful sites. Our webmaster won’t be amused :-).  No big deal you will think, just disable the corresponding error_reporting…

error_reporting = E_ALL & ~E_DEPRECATED

removing E_DEPRECATED did not solve my problem whether changing it in php.ini ,htaccess or in the startup code of Typo. So,… the site is down, and i have no clue what’s going on. Once more, I started up googling. After some time I found some posts concerning about Typo and that ii uses its own error handler, so changing the PHP-INI variables have no effect. lol, okay so where are this variables. As I am not an Typo expert I continued my googling session.

I don’t know why but but it took me “some” time to find this simple configuration flag where you can shut down the internal error handling  of  Typo.

$TYPO3_CONF_VARS[SYS]['displayErrors'] = 0;

Nice, now our Webmaster will be happy and me too 🙂