Thanks for all answers.
Completely baffled, because I did a phpinfo in order to find the correct file and...after restarting server, phpinfo shows this:
display_errors On On
display_startup_errors On On
More info:
Loaded Configuration File /etc/php5/apache2/php.ini
That's the one I edited.
If I load a local file with values for:
// display errors in browser
//@ini_set("display_errors", true);
// report ALL errors, warnings and info messages (that might be a lot)
//error_reporting(E_ALL);
it works! but only for that site
The server is an Ubuntu LAMP with
PHP Version 5.2.10-2ubuntu6.4
I am going to remove E_STRICT and leave only E_ALL in there.
I'll give it another spin after that because this is not making sense to me.