phpMyAdmin: The additional features for working with linked tables have been deactivated

Solution 1:

You simply need to log out of phpMyAdmin or remove the session cookies and reload once the changes are made.

Solution 2:

Looking everywhere I ended up editing this file

/etc/dbconfig-common/phpmyadmin.conf

Nothing related to what I was triyng to do, but I found this comment

# automatically generated by the maintainer scripts of phpmyadmin
# any changes you make will be preserved, though your comments
# will be lost!  to change your settings you should edit this
# file and then run "dpkg-reconfigure phpmyadmin"

So I ran dpkg-reconfigure phpmyadmin despite the fact that it already ran at install time. It asked me if I wanted to recreate the database, my answer was NO.

And now

$cfg['Servers'][$i]['pmadb'] ...  OK
$cfg['Servers'][$i]['relation'] ...  OK
General relation features: Enabled

$cfg['Servers'][$i]['table_info'] ...  OK
Display Features: Enabled

$cfg['Servers'][$i]['table_coords'] ...  OK
$cfg['Servers'][$i]['pdf_pages'] ...  OK
Creation of PDFs: Enabled

$cfg['Servers'][$i]['column_info'] ...  not OK [ Documentation ]
Displaying Column Comments: Disabled
Bookmarked SQL query: Enabled
Browser transformation: Disabled

$cfg['Servers'][$i]['history'] ...  OK
SQL history: Enabled

$cfg['Servers'][$i]['designer_coords'] ...  OK
Designer: Enabled

It's not an upgrade, the table is called pma_column_info and the truth is, I don't care anymore. At least the functions I wanted now are going to work