Yii shell is not working

I tried to run yii shell on Ubuntu 13.10 using this command:

protected/yiic shell

But it's not working. A long lines of HTML output was displayed on screen.

I found 2 solutions on the web:
1st: use this command instead:

protected/yiic shell protected/config/main.php

2nd: modify protected/config/main.php, and add this line at the top:

date_default_timezone_set('UTC')

References:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/11792981/yii-command-tool-not-work
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/7841523/yiic-command-line-tool-outputting-code-instead-of-opening-shell