I am not a Subversion Guru, but as a PHP developer you will get the most benefit from it (productivity wise) if you can install it directly on your production server machine. This is because your development server, staging server, and production server environments will be identical, meaning you will not have to spend time re-coding to make your stuff run due to minor differences in servers.
Framework: http://www.zend.com/products/studio/
To learn Zend Studio:
Zend Studio for Eclipse Developer's Guide http://www.amazon.com/Zend-Studio-Eclipse-Developers-Guide/d... will walk you through it painlessly in a weekend.
Subversion Setup:
1. http://wiki.centos.org/HowTos/Subversion (This is unique to the Centos5/RHEL5 distro)
2. http://www.tonyspencer.com/2007/03/02/setup-a-subversion-ser... (This is unique to Fedora core 6) If you are using a different distro, look for it on the web.
3. http://www.kreci.net/linux/working-with-svn-how-to-start/
I am not a Subversion Guru, but as a PHP developer you will get the most benefit from it (productivity wise) if you can install it directly on your production server machine. This is because your development server, staging server, and production server environments will be identical, meaning you will not have to spend time re-coding to make your stuff run due to minor differences in servers.
You can find free Subversion accounts on the web http://stackoverflow.com/questions/59791/free-online-private... but I do not recommend it for PHP because you lose the benefit of using it in identical development and production environments.