Mike Bernat is a big fan of XDebug and has posted about why he thinks installing it is the best decision you'll ever make.

I finally got around to installing Xdebug on my development environment and have decided it is the best thing since sliced bread. Installation was a breeze and the information it provides when something has gone wrong is incredibly helpful during debugging.

He explains what the software does, how it can help you and your development - even how to get it up and running on your PHP install (seriously, it's drop dead easy...why haven't you installed it yet?). He also points to the tutorial on the Zend Developer Zone introducing the powerful tool.

On the Ibuildings blog, Ian Barber has a reminder to PHP developers out there used to their servers "just working" because of the popularity of LAMP. He recommends digging a little deeper to the "behind the scenes" of how the server is configured.

PHP programmers generally know what a good systems architecture should look like, but it is often a reality of development that they will have little input on the system itself until the last minute. In fact, it's far from uncommon for a developer to be faced with an off-the-shelf dedicated LAMP server, and left up to their own devices.

He recommends getting to know things like the package manager for your distribution (apt, yum, yast, etc), stripping down the modules your installation is using, check that all of the packages in use need to be enabled and ensure that the network connection is set up correctly and is what you need for the site.

Jacques Marneweck points out a tutorial he came across showing how to perform an installation of the PEAR library system on a shared host.

This is quite useful when you are forced into using a clueless shared host who only have the bare PEAR installation on their servers, and have not ever considered installing DB, Mail, Net_SMTP, etc. which lots of people use instead of reinventing the wheel with each project.

The steps of the tutorial are pretty simple and they include two different ways - installing it to your docroot directory if the web host already has the pear binary set up or using ftp/ftps/sftp to upload and install the needed files.

Gennady Feldman has posted the second part of his install instructions for setting up the Oracle Instant Client (11g) and the Oracle OCI8 drivers in PHP.

This is part 2 of my installation instructions. This is my attempt to provide an updated and simplified reference. I am leaving Part 1 as is, because that part can also be useful.

This updated tutorial shows the steps to installing 11g (versus 10g in the previous example) including the packages you'll need, the commands to make it work and a PEAR version of the install if you choose to go that route.

On her blog today Nessa has written up a tutorial on getting SuPHP working along with cPanel on your system.

I wrote this tutorial a while back and figured it would be good to post because suPHP is growing more popular as an alternative to phpSuExec. The instructions assume that you are on a Linux cPanel server and are familiar with how to install PHP, but do not want to use EasyApache's suPHP installer in WHM.

It's a long process but a lot of it is just configuration changes and grabbing the right software. Every line of each of the config files you'll need to change is there ready to cut and paste into your files as well as the command line calls you'll need to make to configure/compile and move files to where they need to go.

In a new blog post Tony Bibbs talks about an issue that he's been having (an "oh so familiar problem") when trying to install the Zend Studio Neon IDE - the same as last time, an issue with a locked resource.

The fix this time was a bit more cumbersome because the unpacking of files happens during the install not when you explicitly uncompress the tarball. However the Internet proved to be a valuable resource again as I found the fix from a blog by someone overseas.

The solution involved breaking the installer (pushing it to the background for a bit) at a certain point, executing a command to replace the variable name and resuming the install process to complete a correct software installation.

On the HowToForge website, there's a new step-by-step tutorial on getting a complete setup of Linux, EngineX, MySQL and PHP on a Ubuntu/Debian box working.

This HowTo will describe the setup of an efficient http server and mail server for small or medium configurations (as low as 96 mb). So this config is ideal for a small VPS. You can find a good choice of cheap and performant VPS (XEN) at x|encon, a german hosting company. they provide many scalable VPS solutions with pre-installed Debian and Ubuntu disc images.

They have it broken out into five overarching steps for getting things working, but there's lots of little sub-steps you'll need to work through to get it up and running. Thankfully, most of the hard part (installing the packages) is handled through the apt-get command and you won't be required to compile.

On Nexen.net today, Damien Seguy presents some numbers on something that there's not a lot of research done on - the number of servers running multiple PHP versions.

This subject was hot at the birth of PHP 4 (running PHP 4 and PHP 3, or course), and it is coming back with a vengeance for PHP 5, backed by the immense user base of PHP 4. If PHP 5 is the default installation in 2008, what will happen to all those users? [...] Based on this observation and my earlier experience of cohabitation, I wondered if there was any indicator of multiple PHP installation.

He used the same tracker he implements for his normal monthly stats and ran a modified query to get the numbers of multiple-version servers that are out there. He's graphed some of the results. Based on his results, though, he notes a market for multiple PHP installations but "a pretty small one", noting that you're probably better off making the jump out to PHP5 anyway.

A new tutorial over on the HowTo Forge website today steps you through the process of getting a multisite Drupal installation set up on Ubuntu via CVS.

This howto shows you how to do a multi-site Drupal install on Ubuntu. It also covers how to layout your directories for ease of maintenance, and how to ensure that you can update Drupal easily from CVS.

Why go to all this bother? Why not just install Drupal using sudo aptitude install drupal? The answer is that as your website gets more popular, you're going to need to keep up to date with security patches, as well as manage all the custom modules you've installed.

The tutorial is broken up into sections:

• Configure DNS
• Install Packages
• Test Apache2/PHP Installation
• Test MySQL Installation
• Install Drupal Using CVS
• CVS Updates
• Create Additional Directories
• Create the Drupal Sites
• Configure Drupal

On the HowTo Forge website, there's a new tutorial all set to walk you through hardening your PHP5 setup on Debian Etch/Ubuntu with the help of the Suhosin patch.

This tutorial shows how to harden PHP5 with Suhosin on Debian Etch and Ubuntu servers. [...] This document comes without warranty of any kind! I want to say that this is not the only way of setting up such a system. There are many ways of achieving this goal but this is the way I take. I do not issue any guarantee that this will work for you!

They start with the initial install of Apache2 and PHP5 (via apt-get) to get the stage set. Building on that is simple - making another apt-get call to pull in the PHP binaries, a wget to grab the latest Suhosin patch, and you're just a few dpkg-buildpackage commands away from having a working setup. Check out the project's configuration page to get more details on tweaking the setup.