I hate to sound negative, but I can't recommend this method of getting a development environment up and running unless you absolutely need MySQL 5. In particular, do not under any circumstances be tempted to use XAMPP on a PC that has any ports exposed to the internet unles you're absolutely certain that you know what you're doing. XAMPP is a development tool and should not be used on production boxes.

The Ubuntu way is to use software out of the repositories wherever possible. That means that you get:

- automatic security updates
- secure default settings
- guaranteed interoperability of software packages
- an effortless upgrade to Edgy.

These things are important, and shouldn't be lightly dismissed.

In Warty, Breezy and Hoary, setting up a LAMP server needed a fair bit of fiddling, but everything is superbly well engineered in Dapper. Just do
Code:
sudo apt-get install apache2 php5-mysql libapache2-mod-php5 mysql-server phpmyadmin
and everything will work perfectly.

I've used XAMPP in Windows, as a WAMP server is a real pig to get running smoothly. But it's really not appropriate for ubuntu.