Ubuntu Server packages are generally pretty well-configured right out of the box–usually requiring little or no configuration for simple operation. It’s one of the reasons why, despite my preference toward Arch Linux for the desktop, I’ve long advocated Ubuntu as a great starting point for a LAMP development server. Yet, on occasion, a package ships with a configuration that needs some work in order to be useful. Xdebug is such a package.

Today I went to copy my music library from Banshee to an old iPod mini. I found out the hard way that the Ubuntu 11.04 upgrade tool uninstalls the necessary programs for MP3 encoding support, causing Banshee to fill my iPod with WAV files. This is most likely a [philosophical decision](http://www.ubuntu.com/project/about-ubuntu/our-philosophy “Our philosophy | Ubuntu”) stemming from the ongoing debate between [open-source pragmatists and free software idealists](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_software_movement#Criticism_and_controversy “Free software movement – Wikipedia”).