I had been using Adobe softwares for web development. These softwares are very professional but very costly. After I switched over to Ubuntu I never touched these software and through out from my PC.

Webserver

For a web developer we usually need a webserver. For PHP developers it is easy to find a webserver without any cost. You can try the LAMP and can install in your local machine. Lamp is the abbreviation of Linux Apache MySQL and PHP / PERL / PYTHON. If you want to install these as a package you can try XAMPP or WAMP. These softwares are completely free and it is available for both windows and Linux machines.

Graphics

Next is your Graphic requirement. It is a truth that I couldn’t find any good alternate for Adobe’s Photoshop. May be I had been using Photoshop for a long time. But you can try GIMP (will work for windows, Linux and MAC OS) or Pixlr (an online free image editor).

IDE (Integrated Development Environment)

Selecting an IDE is very important. There are a lot of softwares available for that. Personally I would suggest NetBeans IDE. Another one is Eclipse. Here is the list of some great IDEs for PHP Developers

1. NetBeans
2. Eclipse
3. Aptana

There is one another simple light weight editor is available , Called Intype. But it works only in Windows. But I like it very much.

FTP Software

Filezilla is one of the Free FTP software. Otherwise you can use FireFTP that can be add on to Firefox. In Ubuntu I am using gFTP.

Guys try these free tools. Give me your comments, follow me on Twitter