Problems during installation of OpenX on Debian Lenny Linux and their solutions

Tuesday, 22nd June 2010

If you’re installing openx on a Debian Linux, you will most probably be forced to note/change few things before the openx installation launches correctly:

Here are a list of things to check and assure are properly configured before you procceed1. If you use the disable_functions, it’s recommended to comment it out during the openx installation:
#disable_functions =exec,passthru,shell_exec,system,
proc_open,popen,curl_exec,curl_multi_exec,parse_ini_file,show_source

2. Increase memory_limit to at least 128MB this is a minimum requirement for openx to run properly:
Edit your /etc/php5/apache2/php.ini and set memory_limit to:
memory_limit = 192M

3. Set the date.timezone in your /etc/php.ini

You need to properly set the date.timezone function in Apache‘s php.ini othewise the OpenX installation will refuse to continue with a warning:

timezoneOpenX has detected that your PHP installation is returning ‘System/Localtime’ as the timezone of your server. This is because of a patch to PHP applied by some Linux distributions. Unfortunately, this is not a valid PHP timezone. Please edit your php.ini file and set the ‘date.timezone’ property to the correct value for your server.

It took me a while until I found the proper way to set the date.timezone php variable, below is a correct way to set the date.timezone in php.ini:

echo 'date.timezone = Europe/London' >> /etc/php5/apache2/php.ini

Note that many people has provided a misinformation concerning the setup of date.timezone on php version 5.2 or 5.3.
Many posts online claim that the date.timezone should be set with date.timezone = “Europe/London” having the quotation marks is variable syntax error so if you enter it that way in your php.ini the date.timezone variable won’t be set correctly.
Some people on the net has also suggested that date.timezone variable format is in the form date.timezone = “US/Central” which I suspect is again erroneous.

Actually the Openx system requirements has a nice explanation on how to properly set the date.timezone in order to fix any emerging issues with the OpenX install, so I suggest you take 5 minutes time and read thoroughly before you start with the OpenX installation.

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