David Behler has provided a complete guide to helping you get a development virtual machine instance up and running quickly complete with Apache, PHP, MySQL and Samba shares to access your files.

I know that no server is like the other and you might still run into some problems due to different library versions and so on, but you gotta admit that two Linux servers have way more in common than a Linux and a Windows server. So in this post I’ll tell you how to setup your own VM with all the libs you need. Even if you haven’t worked with Linux before, you should be able to follow this tutorial/example easily.

He uses an image from thoughtpolice as the base and walks you through every step of the way. He shows you how to log in as root, update all packages and start installing the software you'll need (all via apt-get). There's even a sample Samba configuration file you can use to get started. The end result of all of this setup can be found in this image too.