If $ which pear gives you something like /usr/local/bin/pear and $ pear -v shows a very old version or if you don't want to use it for other reasons, you have to install PEAR in your home directory.
Go to http://go-pear.org, save as gopear.php and do $ php gopear.php or try $ lynx -source http://pear.php.net/go-pear | php -q.
Use /home/user/pear as prefix while installing PEAR, where user is your username.
Once the installation is done, edit your PATH variable to include your planned new PEAR directory before the old one.
For example put a export PATH=/home/user/pear/bin:$PATH at the end of your ~/.bashrc or ~/.profile under Linux. $ echo $PATH should give you now /home/user/pear/bin:[...]
$ which pear should result in /home/user/pear/bin/pear and $ pear -v something like "PEAR Version: 1.4.8" (at the time of writing) or newer. Check the latest stable version at http://pear.php.net/package/PEAR under Current Release.
Now all you need is to set your include_path correctly, most likely via
<?php
$path = ini_get('include_path');
ini_set('include_path', '/home/user/pear'.PATH_SEPARATOR.$path);
?> |