Kevin Schroeder (of Zend) has posted a new video to YouTube on how to get the latest version of Zend Server up and running on a linux machine in under five minutes (four minutes and thirty-seven seconds, to be exact).

He shows you how to:

• Download the server software for manual download
• Set up some basic configuration files
• Update the needed packages and dependencies (in his case RPMs)
• Grabbing a license from the request page on Zend.com
• Set up some of the configuration through the tool's web-based interface

You can find out more about the Zend Server product on its info page on Zend.com

According to this article in The Register, more PHP developers (of the ones polled by Zend) prefer to do their actual development on a Windows platform, but still host their sites on something like Linux (as shown in the results of a Zend survey).

In a recent study from Zend Technologies, forty two per cent of PHP programmers named Windows as their primary development operating system. Linux came second, with 38.5 per cent, while Mac's OS X was third on 19.1 per cent. Zend did not say how many developers it spoke to, but called the December poll a "global survey" ranging from independent consultants to organizations with more than 5,000 employees.

The same survey shows that the choice of Linux for the server is still strong, and that the rest of the options (Windows, OS X) are trailing by a large percentage. You can read Zend's official press release on the survey on PRWeb.net.

Danne Lundqvist has a new post showing how to get MS SQL Server support to work with your PHP installation on linux with the help of the FreeTDS tool.

Adding support for MS SQL Server in PHP is not very difficult. Searching (Google/Bing/whatever) reveals lots of information on how to do this with Windows - naturally - but very little on how to go about it using Linux. Most people use precompiled PHP installations and I will show how to add MS SQL Server support to a precompiled PHP installation here. Those of you compiling PHP yourselves will probably understand what to do and what not based on the information here as well.

You'll have to get and install (compile) the latest version of the FreeTDS software, install the mssql extension from the PECL repository and install the extension into your PHP instance. With it installed and working, you can change the configuration file to add in whatever server information you'd like.

As Chris Jones briefly mentions and this press release discusses in more detail, Zend and Oracle have joined together to make it even easier for those using Oracle to also use Zend Server as their platform.

This is a first step to making it easy for our customers and users to quickly deploy the Zend software stack without having to go to various websites, download various packages and install them. [...] We now host an rpm package on the ULN [Unbreakable Linux Network] servers called zend-server-repo which updates the Linux OS install to also look at the software repositories hosted by Zend. When a user wants to install Zend Server, just a simple command will install the zend-server product directly.

They've also added it as a package for those using the Oracle Enterprise Linuxyum-installable package. You can find out more of the technical details on the Oracle Technology Network.

Zend's press release can be found here.

In a new article from PHPBuilder.com today Marc Plotz starts from the beginning and guides the reader through some of the basics of PHP.

It's been a few years since I echo'd my first HELLO WORLD script. PHP has developed and evolved and yes, it has changed since it was first devised as little Perl extensions on Rasmus Lerdorf's localhost. Still, for a little Home Page script, it has grown into something that is now used on over 200 million websites around the world. That is nothing to be scoffed at. In this article we'll discuss the two most important things we should try to remember when developing in PHP.

His two things are "develop on linux" and "use SVN or CVS". The first tip is up for debate - one of the best things about PHP is its ability to work well on both linux and windows-based systems but the second point is an absolute must for anyone doing any kind of serious development work.

As Brandon Savage mentions in this recent post to his blog, PHP 5.3 (the most current release as of the time of this post) will not be included in the upcoming Ubuntu linux release and won't be upgradable via the normal package tools.

A meeting of the development team on July 30th nixed the inclusion of PHP 5.3 from inclusion in Karmic, the next iteration of Ubuntu for the desktop and the server. According to meeting minutes, there is concern amongst the Ubuntu security team that failure to include the suhosin patch in the PHP release would be a feature regression. Instead, the release will be referred to PPA until more testing can be completed.

Until the package is officially accepted and where users can update it as usual, you can still try your hand at compiling it manually and getting your Apache server up and running quickly.

If you've been shopping around for a new IDE to use in your development, you might want to check out this new article from NETTUTS.com showing eighteen popular IDEs for several different platforms (Win/Mac/Linux).

Last week we looked at 22 Neat Editors for Windows. But sometimes, a code editor simply isn't enough, especially when you're working with things like databases and classes. Which IDE will you prefer? Hopefully you'll find it below!

IDEs that made the list include:

• Visual Web Developer
• PHPEdit
• Expression Web
• Coda
• Eclipse
• Aptana Studio

Stuart Herbert is looking for some more input on a different sort of question (one that I can't say I've seen asked before) - what are some of the issues with default Linux distribution PHP installs.

Most Linux distributions ship with packages for PHP, but not everyone is happy with these packages. If you're not happy with the PHP packages for a specific Linux distro (no matter how obscure), I'd love to hear what you think the problems are and (if possible) what the correct solution should be.

Just leave a comment on the post with the things you might have noticed. Comments already made reference issues in Debian/Ubuntu, RedHat and a few other more general "state of PHP packages" comments too.

On the PHPClasses.org blog today Manuel Lemos has taken a look at how big the PHP market is - how many developers there are and what kind of tools those developers might be using.

Even knowing that only a fraction of the PHP developers in the world will come to a given PHP event, the more PHP developers there are, greater is the chance to have more developers coming to the event. Therefore the first big question is: how large is the PHP developer community world wide? This is a difficult question. Zend has been publishing rough estimates of the number of PHP developers that exist in the world.

According to some estimates, there's over five million PHP developers out there. The PHPClasses site has this tool that can help show the distribution of some of these in user groups. Manuel also shares some stats he's gathered off of his site - a growing trend for visitors to use Linux and OSX as compared to Windows and the predominance for developers to use Firefox over Internet Explorer.

Other tools mentioned include FirePHP, a Javascript Debugger.

Andi Gutmans has posted his Take 2 of his look at the Zend Server product Zend offers and how well it works on Linux.

How many [linux] vendors do you know who go out of their way to not deliver a custom installer or monolithic rpm/deb package but actually build native rpm/deb repositories for the various distros? Call us crazy but our goal was to make this the best possible, most integrated experience for our users and we were willing to work very hard for that.

The post includes screenshots of the linux interface and how Zend Server works to find updates to the software right inside of the normal OS-level package updater.