When looking for an open source project management software I decided to go with Open Atrium. When installing I stumbled upon this error after selecting the locale. “Fatal error: Maximum execution time of 60 seconds exceeded in ..\file.inc on line 934″.
First I visited the open atrium forums where others have been bitten by this problem.
First suggestion was to increase the the max_execution_time by entering in the php.ini
max_execution_time <some high number>
worked for some but not for me because I did not have access to the server.
Second suggestion was to adjust the max_execution_time in the .htaaccess in the root folder by entering
php_value max_execution_time <some high number> under :# PHP 5, Apache 1 and 2.
Failed miserably
Third time was the charm. I stumbled upon John Beckett blog at http://jonbeckett.typepad.com/blog/2011/03/defeating-the-drupal-installation-timeout.html. In it he found that the installation is verifying alot of modules which was causing the timeout. So the solution was to just comment out the line that makes this call. In summary you need to
* Open “install.php” from the root directory of your installation
* Find the line calling “install_check_requirements” and comment it out
* Save changes
* Run install again
Hope this helps someone
