In this tutorial on the XPertDeveloper site today they show you the "quick and not-so-dirty" way to get PHP + Apache + MySQL set up on a Ubuntu machine (from packages).

I have started working with Ubuntu 11.10 and my first task was to install PHP, Apache and MySQL in that. This is because without these three things computer is useless for PHP Developer. So Here I am sharing this article which shows how to install PHP, MySQL and Apache and configure with each other. This would be very useful for newbies, who have just jumped into web developing.

The process mostly consists of installing a few packages - mysql-server, mysql-client, apache2, php5 libapache2-mod-php5 (as well as several others for various PHP extension support) - and starting up the default Apache server.