I have a vserver running openSuse 10.3, Apache 2 and Plesk 8.4. I can update/upgrade neither, as it is apparently not recommended to upgrade openSuse 10.3 (and an update to the EOL 10.4 does not seem to make much sense) and Plesk fails to update no matter what version I try (even fails to upgrade to 8.4.1). Still I can live with that somehow, primarily because I don’t have the time to do a fresh remote install on the vserver.

What really is a problem is, that though the installed PHP is 5.2.6 it has no zip library and no json functions. The first is probably because PHP was not compiled with --enable-zip. The second is a big mystery though. As I understand it, it always comes with PHP unless its compiled with the --disable-json configure option. This is however not the case. And the json extension module is just not there. I even tried to enable it with extension=json.so with no luck either.

the configure options of my PHP are (as shipped with Plesk 8.4)

'../configure' 
'--prefix=/usr' 
'--datadir=/usr/share/php5' 
'--mandir=/usr/share/man' 
'--bindir=/usr/bin' 
'--with-libdir=lib' 
'--includedir=/usr/include' 
'--sysconfdir=/etc/php5/apache2' 
'--with-config-file-path=/etc/php5/apache2' 
'--with-config-file-scan-dir=/etc/php5/conf.d' 
'--enable-libxml' 
'--enable-session' 
'--with-mm' 
'--with-pcre-regex=/usr' 
'--enable-xml' 
'--enable-simplexml' 
'--enable-spl' 
'--enable-filter' 
'--disable-debug' 
'--enable-inline-optimization' 
'--disable-rpath' 
'--disable-static' 
'--enable-shared' 
'--program-suffix=5' 
'--with-pic' 
'--with-gnu-ld' 
'--with-system-tzdata=/usr/share/zoneinfo' 
'--with-apxs2=/usr/sbin/apxs2' 
'--disable-all' 
'--disable-cli'

As I understand it, PECL is not an option with 5.2.6. Or am I mistaken? Even if I was not, the openSuse repository only goes as far as PHP 5.2.4. The openSuse install even came without zypper, which I had to manually install.

So is there a way to get ziplib and json running in PHP 5.2.6 without having to recompile the binary?