If you have a problem with PEAR which comes with PHP 5.2.10 and receiving messages like “pear.php.net is using a unsupported protocal” most probably you have broken PEAR channel data files located at PREFIX/lib/php/.channels/. You need to replace them with files from working installation of PEAR.

Here is an archived .channels/ folder with working data files.

Update: Official solution is simpler – just remove .channels directory and run pear update-channels.

cd `pear config-get php_dir`
rm -r .channels
pear update-channels