Quick note that the PEAR installer is missing (go-pear.org has expired and has been snapped up by some cybersquatters) and http://pear.php.net/go-pear renders a 404. So the current solution is to grab the go-pear install from CVS.

A quick curl call to a url on the cvs.php.net site (in the /pearweb directory) is all it takes to grab the latest. The page it's pulling is the source for the go-pear.php installer that can be run either from a web browser or from the command line (with a PHP binary).