The list below is a summary of the system requirements for Pixaria Gallery. For more detailed explanations of each item, see the detailed system requirements discussion further down the page.
* PHP Safe mode may work but is not generally recommended
Pixaria Gallery will generally work without any modifications on any Unix-like operating system with the Apache web server software installed. Most Linux distributions and recent releases of Mac OS X are fully supported.
Pixaria Gallery generally works without problems on Windows servers but full technical support may not be available for some types of problems.
Disk space, CPU and memory requirements will be dictated by your choice of web server software (Apache, IIS etc.) and the number of files you want to store in your database. In general, if you're running the software on a dedicated server, even a low end machine will have sufficient resources. As an example, the Pixaria demo website is running in a virtual machine with 512 MB of RAM (128 MB available to PHP) and a single Core 2 Duo processor.
If you plan to run Pixaria on a shared server, its important that PHP has a generous memory allocation and that the web server is not throttled to a limited number of processes on the CPU. Some budget hosting providers place heavy restrictions on the resources available to web applications making them unsuitable for using with Pixaria.
For disk space, you will need approximately double the space taken by the files before importing. For example, if you have 1GB of JPEG files, after import, you will need about 1.8 GB of space to store the resized versions of the files. This proportion is reduced for non JPEG files like PSD and TIFF images which only need about 1.3 times the amount of disk space after import.
It's recommended that Pixaria is installed only on servers running PHP version 5.0 or above. The software will work correctly with older versions of PHP (from 4.1 and above) but support for PHP 4 will be dropped with the release of version 3 in 2010.
Version 2.0.1 or above of the GD Graphics Library is required by Pixaria Gallery and support for the library must be enabled for use by PHP on your server. If in doubt about this, please contact your system administrator or hosting provider.
Freetype support and Freetype linkage from PHP and GD are required by Pixaria Gallery in order to use the e-mail postcard functions.
Where available (except on Windows servers), Pixaria is able to make use of the ImageMagick software for resizing images. This provides better image quality during the resizing process and avoids PHP memory usage problems with the GD graphics library.
For best results, it's recommended that your web server has MySQL version 4.1 or above installed. This will ensure optimal performance of the search engine and enable your library to handle accented characters properly.
I also recommended that you use the excellent PHPMyAdmin to administer your database as the user manual does not go into command line database adminitration techniques. Most hosting providers offer access to a pre-installed, web based MySQL administration system through an online control panel.
You can search the Pixaria documentation by entering keywords here. Keep your search simple for the best results.
