CentOS

Here you can find some simple tests that would confirm the smooth functionality of your crontab.

Test if cron is running

Type the following command:

ps ax | grep cron 

Make sure that cron shows up. Expected output should be something like

[konordo@konordoserv]# ps ax | grep cron
 1185 pts/1    S+     0:00 grep cron
 1771 ?        Ss     0:00 crond
 

Test if cron is working

Add the following entry to your crontab. To do so, enter the command

crontab -e

In this example, we will install drush under the directory /usr/local/share/. The path is not really important as long as you adjust the following commands accordingly.

If the directories do not exists, we create them:

sudo mkdir /usr/local/share/
sudo mkdir /usr/local/bin/

And now it time to download and extract drush. Make sure that you have the latest version available and replace the url in the command accordingly.

We also create a symlink so that we can use it everywhere without typing the parent path all the time...

While trying to setup nginx web server, I received the following error on compilation of php from source: Configure: error: Please reinstall the libcurl distribution

As it turns out, curl-devel was not installed.

So after installing that, the problem was fixed.

For CentOS:

yum -y install curl-devel

Note:
More might be missing - if so try installing:

yum install freetype-devel libpng-devel libjpeg-devel libpng libjpeg t1lib  libc-client-devel  libmcrypt-devel gmp-devel mysql-devel 

Also check:

While trying to install Solr in Centos, I noticed that Java 1.5 is required, however Java 1.4 is installed by default.
Now, in order not to have Tomcat start the old Java version, we need to uninstall it using a simple yum line:

sudo yum remove java

Next on the list is to install the new Java versions. Good thing it is included :)

sudo yum install java-1.6.0-openjdk

and

yum install java-1.6.0-openjdk-devel

Finally, we are ready to install Tomcat:

sudo yum install -y tomcat5

Start tomcat with:

service tomcat5 start