I had a problem today at work, I've been coding exclusively in PHP5.2 since it was available and most of the servers I've been working for are Debian or Ubuntu based, so I didn't have any problems until this afternoon. We've recently bought a SAN solution from Dell and to gain support we bought two new servers, both with SUSE Enterprise Linux installed, which only comes with PHP 5.1.2. That particular version came out in January 2006. Since then I've been using the new DateTime object, the filter functions, memory_get_peak_usage() and sys_get_temp_dir(). And they're only the problems I noticed. We could install from source, but then we lose the subtle benefits of package management.

So, this lead to me wondering what LAMP versions the popular distros are using, with the help of DistroWatch, I compiled this table. It only shows the community/open source distributions, the commercials counterparts for each are usually at least a year behind, guaranteeing support but only for out of date versions.

Distribution Version Apache MySQL PHP
Ubuntu 8.04 LTS Hardy Heron 2.2.8 5.0.51a 5.2.4
openSUSE 10.3 2.2.4 5.0.45 5.2.4
Fedora 8 Werewolf 2.2.6 5.0.45 5.2.4
Debian GNU/Linux 4.0 Etch 2.2.3 5.0.32 5.2.0
Mandriva Linux 2008.1 2.2.8 5.0.51a 5.2.5
Knoppix 5.3.1 2.2.8 5.0.51a 5.2.3
Slackware Linux 12.0 2.2.4 5.0.37 5.2.3
Gentoo Linux 2007.0 2.0.58 5.0.38 5.2.2
FreeBSD 7.0 RELEASE 2.2.6 5.0.45 5.2.5