I'm working on my demos for ZendCon and updating a PHP Chat application built on the Microsoft Ajax Client Libraries and the PHPMSAJAX codeplex project.

Since I want to use a JSON serializer and PHP 5.2 has one built in, I wanted to upgrade the default PHP version on CentOS (5.1) to 5.2.

To do this, I needed to install from an alternate repository maintained by "Remi" .

He has a repository for many distros, but since I'm updating CentOS, I used the RedHat ES5 repository.

Here are the commands you need to run.

wget http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pu...5-2.noarch.rpm
wget http://rpms.famillecollet.com/el5.i3...emi.noarch.rpm
rpm -Uvh remi-release-5*.rpm epel-release-5*.rpm

Ater these steps the .rpm(s) are you your system but that not installed and active.

To "install" them do this.....

yum --enablerepo=remi update php

PHP 5.2.6 should now be installed.

Check by running this command in a console.

# php -v

The output should indicate the latest version of PHP.

To see the results from phpinfo(); you'll probably have to restart Apache. (Or at least I did.)