I've recently come through a downright purgatorial effort to get some sort of IDE debugger set up for my Drupal work. Hopefully the notes below will help other folks from running into some of these same problems.

Environment

My usual work environment is a Thinkpad T60 running Ubuntu. My work lately has been heavy on the sysadmin work and light on the coding, but I am now setting about finishing our much-delayed CiviLingua contribution to CiviCRM, and was interested in using a more professional debugging tool than (much as I love it) ... var_dump().