Just wanted to  throw out a  good word for xampp.

As I am trying to build up a collaborative space there seems to be a bit of free time here and there (ie coffee shop); server side scripts are a bit of a challenge to design/build. This is were xampp comes in to play it gives you the abliliy to quickly start up services/daemons for Apache/MySQL/FTP vi a gui control or if you prefer command line is available as well.  Currently I have it working on MacOS and Ubuntu both are working great. Yes I know I could get all those running on both of those environments, the control set is very slick in how it can be fired up for dev on very short notice.