I am currently running Plesk 8.4 on a Linux box with Ubuntu 6.06. The default version of php is 5.1.2 but we want to update this to 5.2.6 . Is there a simple upgrade path that doesn't involve compiling files etc ?
If you don't need any PHP 5.2.x-specific features, I recommend staying with the vendor supplied packages as the Ubuntu folks probably do a better job at keeping their software patched than some random packager. If you really do need PHP 5.2's features I believe you should be able to use the third-party Dotdeb repository: http://www.dotdeb.org/
That entirely depends on whether someone has packaged PHP 5.2 for your OS distribution (what are you running?). If no one did, you'll need to do it yourself, or find someone who will do it for you.