November 05, 2003

Installation from hell (volume 1)

I have a love-hate relationship with Gallery, a software to publish your photos online.

I love it because it is simple and powerful.  You can create trees of albums, upload pictures from anywhere (even directly from your Windows XP desktop), have your guests add comments, etc...

I hate it because it is an unbelievable nightmare to install on anything other than Linux and Apache.

Actually, I take that back.  It is a nightmare to install on Apache as well.

My previous installation on my home machine should have been a warning:  I was encountering random corruption of the pictures and I was never able to explain it.  I tested with PHP 3, PHP4, Apache 1, Apache 2, IIS, CGI and ISAPI.  And all combinations thereof.  I finally managed to find a winning combination (PHP4 + Apache 1 + CGI mode) which still failed sporadically on IE only (always worked fine on Mozilla).

I recently revamped my home machine and installed a brand new XP on a new 120gb hard drive.  Trust me when I say I was not looking forward to reinstalling Gallery.  I braced myself, but it went just as bad as I expected.  Actually, it went worse, because a new version of Gallery has come up since I last installed it and the newer version came with a host of new problems I hadn't encountered before.

First of all, being a PHP application, Gallery has a lot of dependencies on external packages, starting with PHP itself, of course, and also ImageMagick and/or NetPBM (one of them required) and a bunch of other optional packages that I strongly recommend not to install in your first pass.

NetPBM on Windows is, simply put, impossible to find reliably on the net.  Links are broken all over the place, starting with Gallery's own Web site.  Second, when you finally manage to find them, you will find nothing less than three or four different binary distributions, all of them with their own strings attached (some were compiled with djgpp, others with cygwin, etc...).

So I went with ImageMagick, which is a better-behaved citizen (even more so since Gallery only depends on three executables in the ImageMagick distribution).

Coming up in volume 2:  choosing a Web server...

Posted by cedric at November 5, 2003 10:34 AM