This takes you through just about everything you need, all packages, etc. (but assumes you already have Debian set up) For folks on Mac, etc., you may want to

This takes you through just about everything you need, all packages, etc. (but assumes you already have Debian set up) For folks on Mac, etc., you may want to just Google about pre-packaged MAMP - Mac/Apache/Mysql/PHP. (I'm not sure whether there is anything set up for PHP 5.3 and latest MySQL yet.) For a local testing server you shouldn't need to worry about performance.