As I'm teaching myself PHP and MySQL during break, I'm experimenting coding in a Ubuntu virtual machine where Apache, MySQL and PHP have been installed and configured to a shared folder.

I'm not a big fan of Kompozer because the source code layout is a PIA, so I've started checking out gPHPEdit. However, since using it, I've come across two issues:

1. when I edit the .html and .php files, sometimes the file extension will change to .html~ and .php~, becoming invisible to the browser. The only solution is to switch to Windows, right click and rename the file extension.
2. In Ubuntu Firefox, when I click on my prpject's Submit button for in a practice form, a dialog box pops up asking what Firefox should do with the .php file, rather than simply displaying it in the browser. When I do this in Windows Chrome & Firefox, it goes right to the response page.

I'm not sure if this behavior is limited to gPHPEdit/Kompozer, but I've never noticed this happening in Dreamweaver. Any solutions?

EDIT The behavior in Point 1 occurs both when Dreamweaver is open in Windows accessing the same files and when it is not. I changed the extension filename of welcome.php, added a comment in gPHPEdit, and the file changed to welcome.php~ upon saving.