by Richard Oelmann.
I dont think it is Ubuntu per se, simply because you said it works on Debian, and I have Mint17 on my localhost testbed, which also works fine and as Debian > Ubuntu > Mint it does seem unlikely that Ubuntu would cause issues that are not present in either Debian or Mint. I realise thats a simplistic view of the distro process, but its indicative that the issue lies in a specific component such as php rather than the distro itself (yes I know that a distro is basically the sum of all those component parts, but it would be useful to determine the component rather than just the whole distro - if that is the issue ).