On the PHP::Impact blog, Federico Cargnelutti shares some quick steps for setting up a virtual appliance on your system for "LAMP development made easy".

In this article I will show you why the LAMP platform has become the platform of choice for the development and deployment of high performance Web applications. To get a LAMP development environment fired up without the hassles of configuring everything from scratch you only need one thing, a Virtual Appliance.

He explains what the virtual appliance is and show the three step (really just two) process to getting things all set up and working with a complete Ubunutu, Taskel and Zend Framework installation layered on top of your OS now.

Hasin Hayder has a new post to his blog today about trying to set up the PHP extension for interaction between his scripts and the subversion version control libraries on his Ubuntu linux system.

I was trying to interact with my subversion repositories using PHP yesterday and I knew that PECL has a extension named "SVN" for PHP users. So I tried to install in in my machine by when I tried to install it with the [following] command it always failed.

The trick to his hint is to install the libsvn-dev package (found via a search with apt-get) and installed and compiled in to the PHP installation with the extension. Sample code is included.

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.

Hasin Hayder has provided some instructions he's created to install the Imagick extension for PHP on a Ubuntu linux system (7.10) in a new blog entry.

I already have ImageMagick installed in my machine and I tried to install the Imagick extension for PHP but I was stuck with strange errors. I have spent couple of hours today to figure out what I did wrong and Why I cant build that extension. Finally I've figured out that I must install ImageMagick from source first to build that extension. Heres how to.

He walks through the install, talking about where to get the package from, where to get the PECL extension for PHP and the compile process (with the result of a .so file PHP's extension can use).

Sebastian Bergmann has posted the results of some benchmarking on the compilation he's done on the branches of PHP from version 3.0 all the way up to 5.3-CVS.

As people keep asking me for an update to my previous benchmarks (PHP / GCC / ICC Benchmark, PHP 5.1 / GCC Benchmark (Update), and PHP 5.1 Performance, I quickly ran a new benchmark today.

He rendered the results out into a series of charts defining the number of total seconds taken for the compile and how long each of the components took. It's impressive to see how much of a jump there was between the 3.0 series and 4.3.

He also includes his compile settings (and machine information) as well as the numbers for the results if you'd like to graph them out yourself.

The Ubuntu linux group has released an update for their PHP packages to help protect their users from issues like security bypass and remote exploits.

This fixes a weakness and some vulnerabilities, where some have unknown impacts and others can be exploited by malicious, local users to bypass certain security restrictions and by malicious users to bypass certain security restrictions.

Packages can either be downloaded manually or via the linux distro's package manager. This advisory also applies to the corresponding versions of Kubuntu, Edubuntu, and Xubuntu.

On his blog, Vinu Thomas has posted a guide to installing the Java bridge for PHP on an Ubuntu system:

If you're looking for the easiest way to install the PHP Java Bridge in Ubuntu, follow these simple steps...

The basic steps are quick and easy - be sure you have Java installed on your system (commands to install are included), download the Java bridge from Sourceforge and issue the commands (again, included) to install it into your apache2 package.

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.

The HowTo Forge website has a new tutorial posted showing how to get the popular PHP-based content maagement system, Xoops installed and working on your Ubuntu linux machine.

I want to show you how to install Xoops on Ubuntu. I used the Ubuntu 6.10 Server Edition, but it will probably work on other systems as well. Xoops is a modern Content-Management-System which can be extended with a variety of modules. Further information about Xoops can be read on the official Website.

The process is pretty simple, there's basically only four or five main steps to the process, but some have several substeps (like the Xoops install screens that take up a lot of step four).

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