Lorna Mitchell has a (very) quick post on getting Gearman installed for PHP on an Ubuntu linux system - as easy as a few package install calls, really.
I've been using Gearman lately in a project that I'm working on, and of course a month later when I came to deploy the code, I had to look up all over again what was required for a gearman server in order to put it on the new platform. Here is the short version for my future reference (and yours, if you like)
It's an easy two-step process - one to install the Gearman packages (binaries and development) via aptitude and the other using the pecl command to install the gearman-beta package and compile it. All goes well, you should be up and running with Gearman in just a few minutes.