On the PHP::Impact blog, Federico Cargnelutti shares some quick steps for setting up a virtual appliance on your system for "LAMP development made easy".

In this article I will show you why the LAMP platform has become the platform of choice for the development and deployment of high performance Web applications. To get a LAMP development environment fired up without the hassles of configuring everything from scratch you only need one thing, a Virtual Appliance.

He explains what the virtual appliance is and show the three step (really just two) process to getting things all set up and working with a complete Ubunutu, Taskel and Zend Framework installation layered on top of your OS now.