On 2006-12, I (Dave Allen Barker Jr) installed Drupal for my first time. This was my experience.

Versions

Drupal

5.0 beta 2

Web Server

Apache 2.2.3

PHP

5.2.0

Database

MySQL Community Server 5.0.27

Host

Debian testing 2006-12 (almost etch)

Procedure

Get Drupal

Unfortunately, Drupal was not packaged for Debian a the time, so I:

1. Downloaded the tarball from Drupal
2. Unpacked the tarball (tar -xzf tarball)

Install Requirements

Drupal's INSTALL.txt specifies its requirements, of which all were available as Debian packages. This made installation as easy as:

1. aptitude install apache2 php5 php5-mysql mysql-server