This chapter describes, how to install packages from PEAR.
This chapter requires that you are already familiar with the general structure of PEAR.
The base installation that comes with the PHP distribution, contains all the stuff that is needed to run the PEAR installation tools etc. If you have a recent installation of PHP, you can relax: The PEAR base installation is already there, unless you have compiled your PHP with the ./configure flag --without-pear.
The packages that do not come with PHP can be installed with the PEAR package manager. The manager is comparable to Debian's "apt-get". Again: If you are running a recent version of PHP (> 4.3.0) you can skip the next section. But if you are running PHP 4.2.* or earlier, you need to manually install the manager.
Apart from installing packages, the PEAR package manager also handles some other tasks: It can create new packages on your machine, manage a registry of installed packages, check dependencies and it can interact with an XML-RPC service on pear.php.net to serve some other tasks.