Installing Development tools in my new environment

Using the package manager, I grabbed PHP5. This seemed to also grab several additional Apache components.

I installed Eclipse and the Java Runtime environment using the instructions here. This only got me Eclipse 3.2, which is years old, but I decided to give it a go anyway.

Using the instructions here I installed PHPEclipse. It appeared to install OK, but I got an error when I tried to open a new php file. I changed to "plugin development" perspective and got a list of error messages which I then googled. This lead to this discussion on coderanch:

It looks like what happened here is that your PHP plugin authors did a naughty thing and used an internal class that is not present in the version of Eclipse that you have, so their editor is failing to load. What you need to do is check the documentation or website for the PHP plugin and see if you can figure out what version of Eclipse it works with, then try to find and install that version instead of whatever you have now. You could also report this to them as a bug, if the plugin is still being developed.

and the comment right below it from the person who originally had the issue:

Thankyou very much. I thought the problem was with me. I just down loaded the PDT all in one and I'm de-bugging well.

I did the same thing. I grabbed the pdt all in one archive according to the instructions here. This got me a working PHP IDE. Next step is to make sure the webserver works with PHP.