First, you need to know that the current version of PHPEclipse 1.1.8 is not compatible with Eclipse 3.2.X yet, so you need to download and install Eclipse 3.1.X version.
Second, you must first set up subversion server with Apache correctly. After I spent a long time searching the web, I believe this post:Configuring a Development Environment with Apache, Subversion, TortoiseSVN, and Subclipse by Aaron West is the most detailed version to teach you how to do this. However, please note that the article is use Apache 2.0.59; this is because the current subversion Apache mod, mod_authz_svn.so and mod_dav_svn.so are not compatible with Apache version above 2.2. Most of you may use XAMPP, since there are so many places recommend it, but the latest version of XAMP comes with Apache 2.2.4, so this will not work. I come a long way find a very interesting story about this: Getting SVN working with WebDAV on Windows… by Aral Balkan. Trust me, the author told the story very interestingly, and I nearly laugh all the time while I were reading it :) . Since I don’t want to and can’t compile Apache myself on my own machine, this story give me some hint that WAMP Server may works. However, when I go to WAMP Server official website, I found the current version of WAMP also comes with the Apache 2.2.4. Fortunately, I have saved a earlier version of WAMP on my hard driver before, so when I install that version, then I can configure the subversion server with Apache using the instructions find in Aaron’s post above. Anyway, the key here is that you must use Apache 2.0.x if you want to subversion server configured with Apache.
The third thing you must keep in mind is that, since use Eclipse 3.1.x, the Eclipse subversion plugin, need subclipse 1.0.5, not the latest version for Eclipse 3.2.x. The actual install process is quite easy, but after you install then restart and run Eclipse every time, in the error log view in Eclipse, you may found error messages like following:
While loading class "org.tigris.subversion.subclipse.ui.console.ConsoleDocument$ConsoleLine", thread "main" timed out waiting (5000ms) for thread "Worker-1" to finish starting bundle "org.tigris.subversion.subclipse.ui". To avoid deadlock, thread "main" is proceeding but "org.tigris.subversion.subclipse.ui.console.ConsoleDocument$ConsoleLine" may not be fully initialized.
According the information I found in the mail list of subversion, this seems quite normal with the subclipse 1.0.5 in Eclipse 3.1.x; and in the latest version in the Eclipse 3.2.x, this error message will go away.