Manual:Running MediaWiki on Fedora

You have two options for installing MediaWiki on Fedora: installing it as an rpm/yum package or simply deploying the PHP yourself from the tarball or from the Git repository.

Running manually
''This guide assumes that you are using Apache and MySQL. Feel free to add instructions for other servers and databases.''

You can simply frop the tarball in a directory accessible to your web server, navigate to it and run the installation wizard. It is closer to the way the developers work, so it makes it easier for the developers to support you.

You need to have these packages installed before using MediaWiki:
 * httpd
 * mysql-server
 * php
 * php-pear
 * php-xml
 * php-mysql
 * php-intl
 * php-pecl-apc
 * php-gd
 * php-mbstring
 * ImageMagick-perl

So basically just doing the following command shall do

Installing as a package
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 or  more recently 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):

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".


 *  (PNG conversion failed; check for correct installation of latex, dvips, gs, and convert) :

If you have no error with php but no png generated, it's seems to be a problem with a configuration file of Tex. I solved my problem executing fmtutil-sys --all For more informations, I found the solution here : http://forums.fedoraforum.org/showthread.php?t=197978