PHP developers working on Debian have one more reason to be happy with their choice of linux distributions - as Derick Reathans notes, XDebug has been added as an apt-getable package to the Debian systems.

Since a few days, there is a new package in Debian: php5-xdebug. After a few years of talking licenses, due to the help of Martin Meredith and Francois Marier Xdebug can finally be installed with apt-get.

XDebug is a debugging and profiling tool that adds additional information (more than just the usual "error on line..." sort of thing) to the output of your PHP scripts. It also adds more complex functionality like profiling and code coverage reports run on your applications.

Andreas Gohr has posted a guide for creating a mobile Apache installation that could run on something like a USB stick.

Today I spent some time to figure out how to compile a relocatable Apache with PHP support. Yes, this might result in a Linux version of the DokuWiki on a Stick project. Read on for detailed instructions.

The installation is pretty similar to the normal compile with a few small differences. Check out the post for the complete process, commands and all.

A while back Mathew Turland posted a guide for getting a custom version of PHP compiled on a Windows machine.

At the encouragement of Elizabeth Smith, I went through the process (not-so-recently as of this blog entry) of compiling PHP on Windows.

He gives his "laundry list" of things to download/have access to and the link to Elizabeth's tutorial handy. Matthew found a few differences in his compile - an issue with IPv6 support and a pathing problem with the scripts trying to find libmysql.dll. He also throws in his instructions on getting aspell support compiled in.

Andi Gutmans has some great news for Ubuntu users - the Zend Framework will be included in a future version of the linux distribution (Hardy Heron, Ubntu 8).

We are very proud to be an integral part of the Ubuntu distribution going forward. This is an important step towards making Zend Framework accessible to a broader audience and by working closely with the MOTUs we are able to ensure a positive end-user experience.

Andi also points out some of the stats from the framework's life so far: 4M downloads of Zend Framework, 500K of them unique and only growing stronger.

The Slackware linux development group has released a new package for PHP4-using users of their distribution today:

New php-4.4.8 packages are available for Slackware 10.2 and 11.0 to fix security issues. More details about the issues may be found here: http://bugs.php.net/43010.

You can download it from their FTP sites, two versions for each of the most recent distributions: Slackware 10.2 and Slackware 11.0

For anyone that's had an issue with getting XDebug to work with the Debian linux distribution, you might want to check out this helpful hint Carsten Lucke has posted about.

This week I started to setup a Debian-based (Etch) web-server with PHP 5.2 in a virtual-machine with VMWare. Part of this setup was getting XDebug2 integrated. It's really awesome and my students definitely need to learn about it. [...] Building went well as usual but when I tried to integrate the extension inside php.ini it was all weird.

His system kept throwing him an error when he tried to load the shared module using the zend_extension directive, hand things happened. Loading it normally worked (so he knew it wasn't the module) and he finally figured out the problem:

But I need to enable it as Zend extension. Whatever. I finally used the full path to xdebug.so to load it [...] that worked.

Lukas Smith has posted some ominous thoughts about the future of the LAMP stack in the online development world - specifically asking if the popularity of the grouping could be what might ultimately cause its downfall.

The issue is that there is simply not enough top qualified talent that knows LAMP well enough to hire. Or maybe its just too hard to find them? It seems all the good guys are already hired. As a result companies end up looking for other technology, not because they actually believe that these technologies are any better or worth the license fees that these usually require to be paid up...

He suggests two things that could be possible lead-ins to the "demise" of LAMP - the fact that LAMP just isn't taught along side other languages in school and that, since PHP is only just now getting into the offices of the "major players", there hasn't been enough time to prove to them that PHP has worth in their business.

Be sure to check out some of the great comments on this one.

The Open SUSE group has released an update for a list of their software to bring their PHP4 and PHP5 packages up to date.

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.

From the DeveloperTutorials.com website today there's a new walk-through showing you how to get PHP5 installed with Apache and MySQL onto a linux machine of your choosing. They chose to go with SuSE, but it should work on just about anything else.

We will set up PHP as a shared module, being loaded into Apache2 dynamically during the server startup. These instructions are known to work for PHP versions: 5.0.4 through 5.2.1.

They list a few prerequisites (the obvious ones) and where to grab the source for PHP. The rest is broken up into a few simple (hopefully) steps for the unpacking, compiling, configuring and integration with Apache.