As Brian Swan has mentioned in his latest blog post, the ODBC database driver for SQL Server on Linux has been released. This is a huge step forward for directly connecting linux-based systems (and programming languages) to this popular Microsoft product.

The first beta release of the SQL Server ODBC Driver for Linux is available for download! As announced in October, the "Multiplatform Team" (a.k.a. the "MPlat Team") has released a preview version of a driver that will provide first-class access to SQL Server from applications running on Linux operating systems. The team is looking for feedback on this release to incorporate into their production-ready release, so try it out and let us know what you think.

He links to a few resources about the release - more details, a link to download the driver and the official documentation.

On the HowToForge.com site there's a new tutorial stepping you through the process of getting Cherokee+PHP+MySQL working on an Ubuntu linux installation.

Cherokee is a very fast, flexible and easy to configure Web Server. It supports the widespread technologies nowadays: FastCGI, SCGI, PHP, CGI, TLS and SSL encrypted connections, virtual hosts, authentication, on the fly encoding, load balancing, Apache compatible log files, and much more. This tutorial shows how you can install Cherokee on an Ubuntu 11.04 server with PHP5 support (through FastCGI) and MySQL support.

The tutorial makes use of the package manager (apt-get) to install the needed software, so don't look for complete compiling information from this process. They include a bit of the configuration of the Cherokee installation and how you enable PHP support via its interface. Screenshots of the Cherokee interface are included to help make it easier to follow along.

Elvin Haci has a recent post to his blog showing how he set up PHP and Python to work on the same machine, just on different ports of the same Apache instance. His example is based on Ubuntu, but the principles can be used just about anywhere.

Today i decided to install Python in Ubuntu OS and to use PHP and Python both together. If i hadn't installed php and wanted to have python as only localhost in my OS, so it was easy, there are plenty of examples which show how to do it(for example). But if you have already installed php and you want to have python, then let's go on. Of course we need two different ports if we want to do so. And i could easily install and test it. So i am sharing how i did it.

He includes all of the commands and configuration changes you'll need to get Python and Apache all set up (he assumes you already have PHP installed). He also includes a full listing of his Apache config file so you can get a feel of how it all fits together using the VirtualHosts.

In a new post to his blog Hannes Magnusson mentions that the PHP packages for Ubuntu linux installs are woefully out of date and can make a developer's live even more difficult than it already can be. It help ease the situation a bit, he's figured out how to provide custom PHP 5.3 packages to anyone who wants them through a service called Launchpad.

Launchpad makes it really easy to provide your own custom packages, and even has a vast build farm to build packages automatically for different architectures and different Ubuntu releases. The only down side is it doesn't build rpm packages.. Thats fine by me, but that would be really useful for those wishing to deploy on a RedHat based distro.

He took the current package and pulled out a lot of the setup to make a "vanilla" installation. You can then look over at the PHP 5.3 PPA he's provided on his Launchpad account and grab this most up to date package.

Christian Weiske has a recent post to his site looking at something most PHP developers don't even think about when serving up their scripts - the MIME types for PHP files.

While setting some svn properties at work, we wondered about the correct MIME type for .php files.

He found several in the official IANA list including "text/php", "application/php" and "application/x-http-php" - all valid but none of them considered a standard. He talks about the ones supported by linux distributions (like Debian/Ubuntu) and some reasoning that might make "application/php" the best choice of the list. He points out some downsides to the choice, though, including the fact that something starting with "application/" should considered "machine readable" only despite PHP just being text.

On PHP.net there's a quick security advisory for those that didn't see the news - the wiki.php.net machine was compromised but has been wiped and all accounts reset and requiring a password reset.

The wiki.php.net box was compromised and the attackers were able to collect wiki account credentials. No other machines in the php.net infrastructure appear to have been affected. Our biggest concern is, of course, the integrity of our source code. We did an extensive code audit and looked at every commit since 5.3.5 to make sure that no stolen accounts were used to inject anything malicious. Nothing was found. The compromised machine has been wiped and we are forcing a password change for all svn accounts.

The issue was caused by a combination of a problem with the wiki software and a Linux root exploit. The Register has additional comments about the issue and outage.

David Behler has provided a complete guide to helping you get a development virtual machine instance up and running quickly complete with Apache, PHP, MySQL and Samba shares to access your files.

I know that no server is like the other and you might still run into some problems due to different library versions and so on, but you gotta admit that two Linux servers have way more in common than a Linux and a Windows server. So in this post I'll tell you how to setup your own VM with all the libs you need. Even if you haven't worked with Linux before, you should be able to follow this tutorial/example easily.

He uses an image from thoughtpolice as the base and walks you through every step of the way. He shows you how to log in as root, update all packages and start installing the software you'll need (all via apt-get). There's even a sample Samba configuration file you can use to get started. The end result of all of this setup can be found in this image too.

Wes Ray has posted a step-by-step guide to help you get your Fedora server up and running with PHP, MySQL and the Nginx web server. He also sets up Apache as a reverse proxy for the web requests.

Ok so I'm going to make this article quick, simple and to the point. Fuck the bullshit, lets get ya'll setup with nginx with a reverse proxy to apache in less than an hour. Now this article is made for VPS type system such as linode or slicehost. We're starting at the point in which you have Fedora 13 actually installed, base system.

He goes through the steps to install all of the needed packages - nginx, PHP, MySQL - and then how to configure nginx to serve up your websites. He notes that the important part is the location of the container to get PHP working. Setting up Apache is a simple one-line change to the httpd.conf and he even includes the installation of APC, mlocate and fail2ban.

On the PHPFreaks.com site there's a new post that's a guide for creating a basic development environment on a Debian system (complete with VirtualHosts).

This is just a quick walkthrough describing how to setup a decent development environment allowing the easy setup of multiple sites. It already assumes you have a working Debian or Ubuntu OS installed and configured with PHP, MySql & Apache already running. You will also need to have a working sudo.

They add a group for the web server user (www), change some permissions on the web root directory and edit the base Apache2 "sites" file where the VirtualHosts live. They create a sample PHP file - a phpinfo page - in the directory and add a record to the local hosts file for the new domain. Commands for all of the above are included.

On the PHP-GTK blog today there's a new post looking at getting the latest versions of PHP (5.3) and PHP-GTK up and running on a Ubuntu-based system.

At the moment there are some minor problems when trying to get a working installation of PHP with GTK running on Ubuntu based systems. Here is a quick walk through of how you can get this all set up with the trunks from GTK and Cairo and the official package for php-cli in 10 easy steps. This installation was originally done on Linux Mint 9 but should work with most Ubuntu based Linux distributions.

There's ten steps in the process including fetching the packages you'll need with an apt-get call, checking out the latest cairo and php-gtk and the commands to patch and build the source.