Sounds like the toolkit of a hack. Not because he's using PHP, but because it's not current for 2014.<p>The mysqlnd driver has been available since 5.3.0, nearly 5 years ago, and is more efficient than the legacy "mysql" driver. PDO has been around since 5.1.0, 8 1/2 years ago.<p>So why exactly is this guy installing just the php5-mysql package?<p>Also, there are limited situations where a remote server needs something like phpmyadmin/adminer for people to access. There is 0 reason to use it locally.