I spent the vast majority of this decade (up to 2008) manually installing and configuring the AMP part of LAMP. It seemed like a good idea to try to use only the pre-packaged and autoupdated by the Linux distro maintainers. It seemed like it would be a lot faster (it is) and cause much fewer headaches. Unfortunately, my favorite distro’s current version, CentOS 5.3, uses ancient versions of Apache, MySQL and PHP. And, their configurations (such as no Apache DSO support compiled in) are causing me so many problems that I’m going back to manual AMP component installations.
I’m also going to take another look at using Ubuntu for my Linux server needs.