[tlug] [OT] Recommendations for PHP debuggers?

[Dave M G <martin@example.com>]

TLUG,

Apologies for generating a lot of discussion that has been rather 
tangential to Linux discussion. Again, if I have strayed too far, my 
apologies, and please warn me.

My question this time is to do with PHP debuggers. I'm hoping there 
might be someone on this list who does enough PHP editing on their Linux 
machine with some kind of debugging software that they would recommend.

I'm hoping to find advice here because from what I can tell on the net, 
most PHP debugging applications are for Windows, against what I would 
have expected.

For the last month I have been using Zend Studio and Zend Platform on 
the one month trial period. It works well enough that I was considering 
purchasing it.

But it's only now that I realize that the one feature that makes it 
worthwhile for me, the "debug server" option, is only available in the 
professional edition.

I'm just a lone PHP programmer doing web pages for mainly non-profit 
(not charitable, just extremely cash poor) organizations. The difference 
between the 100 US dollar standard edition and the 300 US dollar 
professional edition is a deal breaker.

So I'm looking around for other debugging options.

The best contender so far has been Quanta with the Gubed plug in. But it 
is buggy, and while I've had success in running it, I've also had as 
much trouble. Especially with some error messages that won't go away:
http://forum.gubed.mccabe.nu/viewtopic.php?t=396&sid=5b76626496aab99293e062c494a7af2e

After that PHPeclipse seems good. By "seems" I mean that I've installed 
Eclipse and PHPeclipse and can run them and see they it has a sexy 
interface and all. But trying to download the DBG package that makes 
PHPeclipse interface with the server is a sysiphean task of trying to 
find any instructions anywhere that make sense.

As I'm an Ubuntu user, I tried looking up distro-specific instructions 
for installing DBG, and the one forum entry on the topic I found:
http://www.ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=6672
... says to go to this web page:
http://www.phpeclipse.de/tiki-index.php?page=DbgBasedDebugger
... where the installation instructions are for Windows!

There's also a package called "NuSphere", which is paid software, but 
also rests on the DBG debugger technology. I'm very hesitant to 
encounter the same difficulties in installing DBG and having to pay for 
it as well.

I asked once before on the PHP list about which PHP editors people 
recommend, which is how I heard of Eclipse.

However, now I'm asking:

Does anyone know how to get a reliable PHP graphical debugger to 
actually install and work on Linux?

Any tutorials or instructions available anywhere that are newbie 
friendly? After all, aren't the newbies the ones most likely to be the 
ones to use a GUI debugger?

Any advice or help would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you for your time.

--
Dave M G
Ubuntu 6.06 LTS
Kernel 2.6.17.7
Pentium D Dual Core Processor
PHP 5, MySQL 5, Apache 2