Firstly, let me just say that compiling PHP has never been this difficult before. It shouldn’t be difficult at all actually. So heres the basic run down: I need SOAP, GD, SimpleXML and a few other miscellaneous extensions to make all my dev apps work properly — this went smoothly on the ppc laptop, and I (stupidly) assumed that the Intel would be even easier. My first couple attempts were splattered with GD errors driving me to the brink of insanity as I scrambled up all the pre-requisites. Finally, I had all dependencies met and the configure script STILL would not quit barfing on me. I gave up and finally just installed PHP without GD support (naturally ruining the one project I’m working on currently). I gave up, until I felt feisty enough to give it another shot.

The configure script was choking on a linking error (GD build test failed. Please check the config.log for details.) and kept telling me to hunt config.log for some answers. It turns out that ./configure was attempting to link with shell variables that were empty.

Looks something like “-L: directory name missing“.

The solution

Hacking my way through the configure file you get to the culprit.

LIBS=" -L$GD_LIB $GD_SHARED_LIBADD $LIBS"

Turns out that echo $GD_LIB is blank and being a major pain in the ass. To fix this, just edit the line to look more like: LIBS=" $GD_SHARED_LIBADD $LIBS". After that, try a make clean, rm config.cache and try to compile again. Hopefully this will save you a couple hours of hating life.

Resources:

• http://www.phpmac.com/articles.php?view=3 — good instructions for getting those GD dependencies.
• http://www.phpmac.com/articles.php?view=159 — more insight from the same site
• http://www.afp548.com/article.php?story=20041104230209410 — more about GD dependencies, and a little more insight into problems
• http://www.thescripts.com/forum/thread670263.html — explains the final solution in more depth

My Configure Script
It might be beefed up in the future, but I’m just relieved to have it compiled & working right now — I’m exhausted

./configure --prefix=/usr/local/php5 \
 --mandir=/usr/share/man \
 --infodir=/usr/share/info \
 --sysconfdir=/etc \
 --enable-cli \
 --enable-soap \
 --with-ldap=/usr \
 --with-xml \
 --with-libxml-dir=/usr/local \
 --with-zlib \
 --with-zlib-dir=/usr \
 --with-openssl \
 --enable-exif \
 --enable-ftp \
 --enable-mbstring \
 --enable-mbregex \
 --enable-dbx \
 --enable-sockets \
 --with-curl=/usr \
 --with-mysql=/usr/local/mysql \
 --with-mysqli=/usr/local/mysql/bin/mysql_config \
 --with-apxs \
 --with-gd \
 --with-jpeg-dir=/usr \
 --with-png-dir=/usr \
 --with-freetype-dir=/usr \
 --with-xpm-dir=/usr

Step 1:
In gnome goto System -> Administration -> Network and click on the ‘Hosts’ tab

Step 2:
For your normal localhost (127.0.0.1) double-click or hit ‘properties’ to edit it. Add your list of subdomains under localhost.

*Ignore the text in this pic, I overlooked that you had to include _all_ aliases in the same box. Whoops

Step 3:
The fun step
Open a terminal and type sudo gedit /etc/apache2/sites-available/default — assuming you’re using the “default” httpd.conf. Chances are that you will be, and if you aren’t you should know what file I’m talking about anyway. (If you don’t, just load one of the enabled apache configuration files)

Change these lines:

NameVirtualHost *
<VirtualHost *>

to

NameVirtualHost 127.0.0.1
<VirtualHost 127.0.0.1>

Step 4:
Add the following (for each subdomain you made) — changing the ServerName to whatever you aliased in the network host dialogue and DocumentRoot to wherever you want the subdomain to point.

<VirtualHost 127.0.0.1>
	ServerName mysql.localhost
	DocumentRoot /var/www/phpmyadmin
</VirtualHost>

Step 5:
In a terminal type: sudo apache2ctl restart
When that finishes, browse to http://mysql.localhost and you should see phpMyAdmin (going by my example)

On OSX + Apache 1.33

Step 1:
Open /Applications/Utilities/NetInfo Manager and click on “machines”
I usually just duplicate the localhost settings, or just create a new record below localhost that is something like:

ip_address: 127.0.0.1
name: mysql.localhost
serves: ./local

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Step 2:
Repeat Steps 3-5 above only editing “/etc/httpd/users/{yourname}.conf” instead.

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Restart Apache and hopefully all went well. I found this useful because I hate typing unnecessary paths