Jacques Marneweck points out a tutorial he came across showing how to perform an installation of the PEAR library system on a shared host.

This is quite useful when you are forced into using a clueless shared host who only have the bare PEAR installation on their servers, and have not ever considered installing DB, Mail, Net_SMTP, etc. which lots of people use instead of reinventing the wheel with each project.

The steps of the tutorial are pretty simple and they include two different ways - installing it to your docroot directory if the web host already has the pear binary set up or using ftp/ftps/sftp to upload and install the needed files.

Hasin Hayder has provided some instructions he's created to install the Imagick extension for PHP on a Ubuntu linux system (7.10) in a new blog entry.

I already have ImageMagick installed in my machine and I tried to install the Imagick extension for PHP but I was stuck with strange errors. I have spent couple of hours today to figure out what I did wrong and Why I cant build that extension. Finally I've figured out that I must install ImageMagick from source first to build that extension. Heres how to.

He walks through the install, talking about where to get the package from, where to get the PECL extension for PHP and the compile process (with the result of a .so file PHP's extension can use).

Stuart Herbert has posted about a very helpful method server admins can use out there to not only help secure their server but possibly make their web hosting users more happy in the long run - using suphp on a shared server (security).

The challenge with securing a shared hosting server is how to secure the website from attack both from the outside and from the inside. [...] This has created a gap that a number of third-party solutions have attempted to fill. One of the oldest of these is suphp, created by Sebastian Marsching.

He works through the whole process - the installation (this is all on a Gentoo linux system), configuring for your Apache install, changing Apache to make it work with suphp and finally some benchmarks and parting comments concerning its use.

Tony Bibbs comments today about some issues that he's been having with his installation of Zend's Studio IDE ever since he made the update to a more recent version of SUSE - version 10.3.

Well, upgrading from openSUSE 10.2 to 10.3 has been a bit brutal. [...] So this morning I got to work and had a customer demo and felt I needed to have the Zend Studio IDE working to be able to make some quick changes on the fly and it would work.

His problem was with an assertion issue - the resource the software was trying to access was locked. He did find a solution, though on Chris Hope's blog involving a sudoed call to sed to replace a value in one of the shared libraries for Zend Studio, replacing one variable name with another.