PEAR by default is installed into /usr/share/pear which can conflict with current security settings per hosting server.
Pear official howto:
http://pear.php.net/manual/en/installation.shared.php
Install pear on shared web host:
http://www.techrepublic.com/article/application-development-install-pear...

Investigating al the above options - which seemed to me overloaded with extra information - the best solution for me was to include PEAR sources with components I need into project tree and commit into CVS - then setup of new checkout will not be dependent on development environment.

1. Create `pear` directory in your httpdocs root /pear/
2. Untar sources of the latest PEAR lib into pear
3. Untar all component sources into pear/component1, pear/component2
4. Add path `pear/` into include_path inside .htaccess file:
php_value include_path ".:pear/"