We have a client for whom we've been asked to do some work removing sIFR headlines, and updating with @font-face.

Sounds simple, except in getting a SQL dump, and archive of the site in order to do a dev install, we find it's built on CakePHP 1.2. Stale cake.

Despite everything being properly configured, we are getting an Internal Server Error.

After looking at Apache logs, and doing some reading, it appears PHP5 and Cake 1.2 don't play well.

We asked for a sub-domain in order to dev on the native environment, but the client server security is tight as a drum, and is not an option.

So, it's our intent to set up a duplicate environment and stack to mimic the client environ.

What I've sniffed out is they are running some version of Free BSD, with Apache, MySQL, and what will probably prove to be PHP4.

Checking Linode documentation, I don't find any meaningful reference to installing Free BSD. The focus here seems to be Ubuntu, Debian, and to a lesser degree Gentoo Linux.

So, question at the moment, is there any reason we couldn't install Free BSD, and a LAMP stack with older v PHP on a fresh Linode?

Thoughts, and right-directions appreciated.

FreeBSD on a Linode should work with Linode's pvgrub kernel. I've always meant to try. I read on a forum that it isn't stable unless you ask support to allocate only 1 CPU to your Linode. I have no idea if that is still the case.


I get the impression FreeBSD on Linode is experimental at best so maybe you want to put the FreeBSD dev machine elsewhere.

http://wiki.prgmr.com/mediawiki/index.p ... _as_a_DomU

^ this is extremely helpful. You'll need to adjust a few things so that it works on Linode.

A few hints:

* `disklabel` is your friend
* use EXT2 for your kernel disk image
* just use the provided kernel+world tarfile unless you know what you're doing.

_________________
me | voltaireMC

Thank you both for the input.

I'm not convinced running FreeBSD is as important as simply installing the older version of PHP so Cake plays nice. We could probably get away with an Ubuntu distro which is our usual base.

that's probably the smarter choice, although maybe not the "fun" one

_________________
me | voltaireMC

Any time anybody has ever gotten FreeBSD running around here, the result has been "It works, but I have all these issues". It's fun for experimenting, but not production-ready.