Why are my php tags converted to html comments?

Question

A friend\'s lamp host seems to be misconfigured. I try to execute php, but it doesn\'t seem to be working.

In Chrome\'s inspect element:

Answer 1

Sounds to me that your PHP is not correctly configured or installed in your lamp configuration. What distribution are you using? It might be as simple as running a command to re-install PHP, otherwise you will likely need to compile apache with php support.