Having just received his brand new Neo Freerunner device (a linux-based phone) Derick Rethans did what any other good PHP developer out there would do - he installed PHP on it right away.

As I mentioned, the Freerunner is basically a Linux computer - which means total freedom of what you install on it. Traditionally it comes with perl and python, including GTK bindings. However, no PHP is found on it. I set out to change that. Unfortunately there were some issues with cross compiling, so I decided to compile PHP on the phone. There were some issues with this.

Because the included BusyBox toolset (that emulates much of the traditional Unix tools) didn't have all he needed to compile directly, he compiled the "coreutils" libraries and installed them to the phone. After a few manual tweaks and file copies he had what he needed and ran the compile without issues. He even created a package you can download (a countdown timer) to see if your install is working correctly.