Can I upgrade to PHP5 (from 4.2.2) on Redhat 9 ?
 

Don't want to go to the trouble of upgrading the whole OS. But I do need PHP5 with a version of Mysql that will work with it as well.
Can anyone recommend a distro and give me the steps?
Don't have any critical databases.

There is not a single distro option for what you want to do. What you need is:

1- Linux
2- Apache Web Server
3- MySQL database server
4- PHP 5

This combination is very popular and widely installed.

Linux Apache MySQL PHP = LAMP

Google installing a LAMP server . There are tons of documents.
Obviously you will need to start with installing the OS then go from there.

Thanks for this advice. Having looked at some of the information you pointed me at, I have decided to start with a fresh PC and install CentOS 5 from scratch. This seems to come with all the systems I need.

Richard Smith