How to install php5-dbase extension?

[apmuthu]

apt-get install php5-pear
apt-get install php5-dbase

The above code does not install php5-dbase.

On a fresh joomla template install, I get:

# aptitude search dbase
p   acidbase                        - Basic Analysis and Security Engine

# aptitude search pear
p   egroupware-egw-pear             - modified PEAR modules for eGroupWare
p   lxappearance                    - a new feature-rich GTK+ theme switcher
p   pearpc                          - PowerPC architecture emulator
p   php-pear                        - PEAR - PHP Extension and Application Repos
p   pysycache-dblclick-appleandpear - Apple and pear images for double click act

 

[apmuthu]

Resulting prompt while trying to install acidbase:

# apt-get install acidbase
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
The following extra packages will be installed:
  dbconfig-common libcompress-raw-zlib-perl libcompress-zlib-perl
  libfont-afm-perl libhtml-format-perl libhtml-parser-perl libhtml-tagset-perl
  libhtml-tree-perl libio-compress-base-perl libio-compress-zlib-perl
  libmailtools-perl libphp-adodb libtimedate-perl liburi-perl libwww-perl
  postgresql-client postgresql-client-8.3 postgresql-client-common
Suggested packages:
  snort-mysql snort-pgsql php5-adodb libio-socket-ssl-perl postgresql-8.3
  postgresql-doc-8.3
The following NEW packages will be installed:
  acidbase dbconfig-common libcompress-raw-zlib-perl libcompress-zlib-perl
  libfont-afm-perl libhtml-format-perl libhtml-parser-perl libhtml-tagset-perl
  libhtml-tree-perl libio-compress-base-perl libio-compress-zlib-perl
  libmailtools-perl libphp-adodb libtimedate-perl liburi-perl libwww-perl
  postgresql-client postgresql-client-8.3 postgresql-client-common
0 upgraded, 19 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
Need to get 4638kB of archives.
After this operation, 15.8MB of additional disk space will be used.
Do you want to continue [Y/n]?

 

[apmuthu]

During the install we get:

 Configuring libphp-adodb
WARNING: include path for php has changed!                         │
 
libphp-adodb is no longer installed in /usr/share/adodb. New installation path is now /usr/share/php/adodb.
Please update your php.ini file. Maybe you must also change your web-server configuraton.
<Ok>

And:

Configuring acidbase
 
NOTE: Manual configuration required
 
You will need to go to http://localhost/acidbase first to force the
database modifications for BASE.
 
<Ok>

And:

Configuring acidbase ├──────────────────────────┐
 │                                                                           │
 │ acidbase must have a database installed and configured before it can be   │
 │ used.  If you like, this can be handled with dbconfig-common.             │
 │                                                                           │
 │ If you are an advanced database administrator and know that you want to   │
 │ perform this configuration manually, or if your database has already      │
 │ been installed and configured, you should refuse this option.  Details    │
 │ on what needs to be done should most likely be provided in                │
 │ /usr/share/doc/acidbase.                                                  │
 │                                                                           │
 │ Otherwise, you should probably choose this option.                        │
 │                                                                           │
 │ Configure database for acidbase with dbconfig-common?                     │
 │                                                                           │
 │                    <Yes>                       <No>

 

[apmuthu]

All the above still does not install php5-dbase.

Infact even after apt-get remve acidbase, the folder /usr/share/php still remains unremoved and the contents of /usr/share/php/adodb is also intact.

 

[apmuthu]

# apt-get install php5-dev libmysqlclient15-dev

Results in an error:

Err [URL]http://ftp.debian.org[/URL] lenny/main libc6-dev 2.7-18
  404 Not Found [IP: 130.89.149.226 80]
Failed to fetch [URL]http://ftp.debian.org/debian/pool/main/g/glibc/libc6-dev_2.7-18_i386.deb[/URL]  404 Not Found [IP: 130.89.149.226 80]
E: Unable to fetch some archives, maybe run apt-get update or try with --fix-missing?

On searching tsome repos, there is a similar file available at:
http://security.debian.org/debian-security/pool/updates/main/g/glibc/libc6-dev_2.7-18lenny2_i386.deb

 

[apmuthu]

After a apt-get update and apt-get dist-upgrade we can now install:

# apt-get install php5-dev libmysqlclient15-dev

The current /etc/apt/sources.list file has the following contents:

deb [URL]http://ftp.debian.org/debian[/URL] lenny main contrib
deb [URL]http://security.debian.org[/URL] lenny/updates main contrib

Included the following lines to it:

#Uncomment if you want the Sources
deb-src [URL]http://ftp.debian.org/debian[/URL] lenny main contrib nonfree
deb-src [URL]http://security.debian.org[/URL] lenny/updates main contrib nonfree

Even now we get an error when we try to install the php5 sources:

# apt-get source php5
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
E: Could not open file /var/lib/apt/lists/ftp.debian.org_debian_dists_lenny_main_source_Sources - open (2 No such file or directory)

How do we then install the php5-dbase extension?

 

[apmuthu]

Extracted dbase.so from ftp://194.199.20.114/linux/fedora/r.../i386/os/Packages/php-common-5.2.6-5.i386.rpm located at http://www.rpmfind.net/linux/rpm2html/search.php?query=php-common

and uploaded it to /usr/lib/php5/20060613+lfs/ where the other extensions reside. Whilst the other extensions are loaded automatically, we need to include the following line into the php.ini files at /etc/php5/apache2/ and /etc/php5/cli/ folders :

extension=dbase.so

Then we restart apache:

apache2ctl restart

Place a test file called say dbasetest.php in the webroot with the following code:

<?php
// database "definition"
$def = array(
  array("date",     "D"),
  array("name",     "C",  50),
  array("age",      "N",   3, 0),
  array("email",    "C", 128),
  array("ismember", "L")
);
// creation
if (!dbase_create('/tmp/test.dbf', $def)) {
  echo "Error, can't create the database\n";
}
?>

and execute it at http://ipaddress/dbasetest.php and you will find that there is a test.dbf file created in the /tmp folder.

 

[apmuthu]

Solved at last.

The PHP tar.gz source file from www.php.net (or http://museum.php.net for archives) contains all major PECL extensions including dBASE.

I used a fresh install of the OpenVZ Joomla template running on ProxMox v1.4 - to install php5-dbase.

The following did not work:

## apt-get install php5-dbase
## nano /etc/apt/sources.list
## apt-get source php5
## ls /var/lib/apt/lists -lR

Preliminary Checks:

locate php.ini
cd /etc/php5/apache2
nano php.ini ## insert extension=dbase.so
cd /etc/php5/cli
nano php.ini ## insert extension=dbase.so
apt-get -V check php5-*
apt-cache search dbase
cd /
locate *.so

The actual compile and install:

apt-get install php5-pear php5 php5-dev php5-cli libmysqlclient15-dev gcc make
wget [URL]http://packages.debian.org/lenny/i386/libc6-dev/download[/URL]
mkdir /php
cd php
ls -al
wget [URL]http://museum.php.net/php5/php-5.2.6.tar.gz[/URL]
tar -zxvf php-5.2.6.tar.gz 
chown -R root:root php-5.2.6
cd php-5.2.6/ext/dbase
## save the original dbase and overwrite with our r2 update attached herewith
zip -r dbase-org.zip * phpize
./configure
make
cp /php/php-5.2.6/ext/dbase/modules/dbase.so /usr/lib/php5/20060613+lfs
cd /
rm -r /php
apache2ctl restart
cd /var/www/joomla ## Transfer the PHP-dbase Test PHP script
chown www-data:www-data dbasetest.php 
apache2ctl restart ## verify the phpinfo page
apt-get remove php5-dev libmysqlclient15-dev gcc make
apt-get autoremove

The attached zip file has a dbasetest.php file and an i386 compiled dbase.so file along with the SVN source code for the php5-dbase extension - extended for extra field types.

 

[apmuthu]

There is one catch though: Date (8 bytes) and Logical (1 byte) fields in a DBF file will be read correctly, but on creation and updation, the field sizes get truncated to zero in the DBF file header.