Just to be clear I mainly want to build a development environment on my laptop. I intend to upgrade to a virtual server hosting package shortly (on account of the kind of issues i've encountered already re. try catch statements and old versions of php) and i'll be going on CentOS 5 as i have no interest in Linux as a desktop personal pc user only to run a web app i'm developing hence the choice of CentOS and not Ubuntu. Thanks for the help and advice guys. Much appreciated.