On the symfony blog Fabien Potencier has posted about the new "getting started" tutorial that's been posted for the symfony 1.2 release of the framework.
This new tutorial aims to become the definitive place to find all information related to the symfony installation process. It describes in great details everything you need to know to install symfony correctly. The goal is to also provide a single resource for people wanting to try out the framework and avoid discouraging them with a bad installation experience.
You can find the new tutorial and a newly rewritten installation guide on the cleaned up symfony homepage.