I'm Kevin. I live in Salem, Mass with my wife and little boy and I build software.

So, I've been playing around Drupal 7 and wanted to put together a local server for testing. The only crux is that the only "server" I had to work with was a cruddy old eMachines desktop with 640MB of ram running Fedora Core 5. Well, long story short, I had neither the time, patience nor the bandwidth to download Fedora 9. Unfortunately the Fedora 5 distro only comes with php 5.1 yet Drupal 7 requires PHP 5.2. Yum showed no available updates, so I had to scour pbone.net for a bunch of FC5 RPMs to get it up and running. Here's a quick Breakdown:

First, locate and remove the old PHP installation and extras: $ rpm -qa | grep php the -qa option shows which RPMs have been installed and | grep php filters out anything not containing "php" $ rpm -e php-cli php-common php php-gd php-pdo php-pear the above, run as root, will remove any of the listed RPM packages installed

Second, download the new RPM files from a repository like pbone.net - I grabbed the following RPMs for Fedora 5:

• php-cli
• pcre
• php-common
• php-5.2
• php-mbstring (required for D7)
• php-gd
• t1lib (libt1.so.5 is required by gd)
• php-pdo
• php-pear
• php-mysql
• sqllite (required for php-mysql)

Third, install the above RPM files $ rpm -Uvh pcre-6.6-1.fc5.... $ rpm -ivh php-common-5.2.... and repeat for the additional packages. Note, use the -Uvh to upgrade packages that are installed, and -ivh to install the ones you do not currently have installed.

Fourth, set up CVS on the server and check out the latest from HEAD: $ yum install cvs $ cvs -z6 -d:pserver:anonymous:anonymous@cvs.drupal.org:/cvs/drupal checkout -d var/www/html drupal

Fifth, and final step, was to tune apache a bit, set up the database and install Drupal 7! Now I've got a server that I can quickly keep up to date with Drupal HEAD and compare patches against the CVS.