This tutorial shows how to install php5 debugger (xdebug) on OpenSUSE 11.3.

The steps of the process are super simple because of the "zypper" package manager:

• Install the PHP5, Apache2 and PHP for Apache module
• Download the latest Xdebug version and unpack it
• Build Xdebug
• phpize it to build the shared object
• Update your php.ini file to add it in

Lighttpd is a secure, fast, standards-compliant web server designed for speed-critical environments. This tutorial shows how you can install Lighttpd on an OpenSUSE 11.1 server with PHP5 support (through FastCGI) and MySQL support.

Most of the software installation is handled via packages installed by the "yast2" package manager but you'll still need to go in and modify some of the configuration files to get PHP and Lighttpd to play nicely together. Besides the MySQL package required for PHP's MySQL support, they also suggest getting a few other packages for things like SOAP, SQLite, IMAP, zlib and openssl.

php5 was updated to version 5.2.5 to fix several security vulnerabilities. For php4 on SLES9 the patches were backported.

You can find out more about the issues corrected as well as links to the packages that have been updated in the advisory message.

Well, upgrading from openSUSE 10.2 to 10.3 has been a bit brutal. [...] So this morning I got to work and had a customer demo and felt I needed to have the Zend Studio IDE working to be able to make some quick changes on the fly and it would work.

His problem was with an assertion issue - the resource the software was trying to access was locked. He did find a solution, though on Chris Hope's blog involving a sudoed call to sed to replace a value in one of the shared libraries for Zend Studio, replacing one variable name with another.