Manual:Running MediaWiki on Fedora

MediaWiki is available as a part of Fedora Extras (4 or later). In order to install it, you should run as root. After installation, open the file  and follow the instructions there.
 * 1) yum install mediawiki

Note that in recent installations the INSTALL file is at

If you need support for mathematical formulas, you also need to install :
 * 1) yum install mediawiki-math

If you have a more recent Fedora, there is no package mediawiki-math. Because mediawiki requires "texvc" for LaTeX you'll also need to install LabPlot
 * 1) yum install LabPlot

On Fedora Core 4, installing version 1.5.8-1, additional steps are needed to enable inline LaTeX translation. Some of these steps are described in the following file:

/usr/share/doc/mediawiki-math-1.5.8/README

If LaTeX formulas are displayed without translation, you might need to uncomment the following line manually in LocalSettings.php, and possibly also restart your httpd server:

$wgUseTeX = true;

Here is a method to restart the httpd server under Fedora:

/etc/init.d/httpd restart      - from root prompt (not recommended) sudo /etc/init.d/httpd restart - from user prompt with sudo configured

After enabling $wgUseTeX, you might see an error message such as this:


 *  Failed to parse (Can't write to or create math output directory): \mbox{abc}

In MediaWiki file Math.php one finds this source code line:

global $wgMathDirectory, $wgTmpDirectory, $wgInputEncoding;

In my default LocalSettings.php I found these lines:

$IP = "/var/www/mediawiki"; $wgUploadDirectory = "$IP/images"; $wgMathDirectory   = "{$wgUploadDirectory}/math"; $wgTmpDirectory    = "{$wgUploadDirectory}/tmp"; $wgTexvc           = '/usr/bin/texvc'; $wgUseTeX          = true;

Which suggested this fix:

cd /var/www/mediawiki/images sudo mkdir math sudo mkdir tmp sudo chown apache math tmp sudo chmod 775 math tmp

And then there was math.

For Fedora-specific bug reports, use http://bugzilla.redhat.com/ with the product field set to "Fedora Extras" and the component field to "mediawiki".