Development environment in Linux

So getting my development environment set up in linux was no small task. I'm using Fedora 6. Here were some of the obstacles:

1) The distribution's version of Firefox doesn't come compiled with the necessary debug flags for Firebug to work properly. I downloaded a new version of Firefox directly from the website and that seemed to have solved most of the debug problems. I've heard that you may need to download the source and compile it by hand with some special flags, but luckily the downloaded tarball worked for me.

2) The php-json package was missing from my installation of php. A simple yum install fixed that problem.