Hey

So I'm having all sorts of problems getting my old apps to run since I had to redeploy my linode and I'm working from a backup.

Short version:
I installed squeeze and then apache, mysql, php5 and phpmyadmin all using apt-get as per the guides on here. Once everything was running again, I found out that it installed php5.3.3 and that my old apps don't support it. After wasting an entire day trying to upgrade the apps, things just weren't working so I tried to downgrade to php 5.2 but that lead to more issues namely that the mcrypt externsion won't install (and therfore phpmyadmin won't reinstall) and for some reason GZIP is giving me errors and I can't reinstall it.

In short, everything is a mess and I just wanna redeploy and start fresh but I wanna do it using php 5.2 and make sure that mcrypt gets installed and i can run phpmyadmin.

I'm also hoping I will be able to install everything else without issue using apt-get (apache, apc, mysql).

sorry for what is most likely a simple question.

thanks!

This might help:
http://www.google.com/search?q=debian+squeeze+php5.2

You do realize that PHP 5.2 is no longer supported, right?
http://www.php.net/archive/2011.php#id2011-08-23-1

i did the google search and i was finding stuff more about how to downgrade which i did and things didn't turn out so well.

and yes i know it's not supported anymore but unfortunately, I still need it to run my old apps

What is the problem with your old apps?

The only issues I personally had with my apps was they now throw a warning when using date but have not specifically set timezone in the script (specifying it in php.ini isn't good enough) and they changed how file_info() reports a file type.

I don't doubt you have some issues, but maybe you could specify what the errors are and someone could help?