Spent the weekend failing to install phpMyAdmin

fresh install of asterisknow with asterisk 1.6 and freepbx 2.7

upgraded asterisk to 1.8, upgraded php to 5.33 and mysql to 5.152
yum updated

installed phpMyAdmin 3.3.8 from remi

Problem

On attempting the setup I get the ubiquitous

“Cannot load or save configuration
Please create web server writable folder config in phpMyAdmin top level directory as described in documentation. Otherwise you will be only able to download or display it.”

Have commented out appropriately in /etc/httpd/conf.d/phpMyAdmin.conf
Have chown -R asterisk:asterisk /var/lib/php/session
Have chown -R asterisk:asterisk phpMyAdmin

Please someone put me out of my misery! Whats missing?

Here are my notes on how to install, they worked fine for me:

  1. Install phpMyAdmin by running the following commands (do not go beyond 2.x.x unless php version 5.2 or above is resident:

    cd /usr/src/

    wget http://internode.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/phpmyadmin/
    phpMyAdmin-2.11.10-all-languages.tar.gz

    tar -xzf phpMyAdmin-2.11.10-all-languages.tar.gz

mv /usr/src/phpMyAdmin-2.11.10-all-languages /var/www/html/phpMyAdmin

cd /var/www/html/phpMyAdmin

cp config.sample.inc.php config.inc.php

nano config.inc.php

Edit Line 30 $cfg[‘Servers’][$i][‘auth_type’] = ‘cookie’; to read: $cfg[‘Servers’][$i][‘auth_type’] = ‘config’;

Insert the following two lines after Line 34:

$cfg['Servers'][$i]['user'] = ‘freepbx’;
$cfg['Servers'][$i]['password'] = ‘fpbx’;

Save the file with nano. [Ctrl X, y, return]

Hope it helps.

chown asterisk:asterisk /var/lib/phpMyAdmin -R

httpd is running under group:user of asterisk:asterisk but phpMyAdmin got installed somehow with apache:root. Took too much of my life to crack but now it’s done, I hope I save someone else the sleepless nights of frustation.