Common Installation Problems

After Installation

No date shown in title bar, no calendar

A fresh OpenEMR 3.2.x install suffering from broken timezones

Problem

I just installed OpenEMR, and when i login, the place where the calendar should be is blank, and the bar across the top shows no date. whats gone wrong?

Confirming

PHP is probably having a timezone problem. to confirm this, drop the following contents into a file in apache's root (the place your openemr/ directory is), and try loading it with your web browser:

<?php
echo "hi " ; 
echo date(time());
echo " there" ;
?>

when you load that, you should see 'hi there', with the current date in the middle of it(represented as a string of numbers). if you just see "hi ", this means this is likely your problem.

If you enable display_error_messages=On in your php configuration (/etc/php5/apache2/php.ini on my machine), you should see something similar to:

hi
Fatal error: strtotime() [<a href='function.strtotime'>function.strtotime</a>]: Timezone database is corrupt - this should *never* happen! in /var/www/timetest.php on line 3

Possible Solutions

Make sure that /etc/localtime/ is readable as the user you run apache as(www-data on debian). Make sure you have timezone info packages installed (tzinfo on debian).

Now, make sure you have a timezone selected. because I was Doing It Wrong^tm, on my machine, there was no timezone selected. running 'dpkg-reconfigure tzdata' and selecting a timezone fixed my problem.

Confirming the Fix

Other than the obvious "yay! i see the calendar again!", when the fix is working, the previous script will instead return something similar to:

hi 1258691922 there

Blank Screens on PHP 5.4.x

To run on PHP 5.4, you must use OpenEMR 4.1.0 with Patch 11 or greater or OpenEMR 4.1.1.

Verifying the issue

If you find errors similar to the follow in your Apache error log, this is confirmation of the issue:

[Mon Jul 23 16:49:11 2012] [error] [client 127.0.0.1] PHP Fatal error: Call-time pass-by-reference has been removed in /var/www/openemr/library/freeb/xmlrpcs.inc on line 498, referer: http://localhost/openemr/interface/main/main_info.php

Possible Solution

Installing 4.1.1 (with most recent patch) or 4.1.0 (with most recent patch) should address this issue http://www.open-emr.org/wiki/index.php/OpenEMR_Patches