Comment Use XAMPP as your LAMP setup (Score 1) 382
I agree with other posts about using XAMPP (http://www.apachefriends.org). I've used it quite a bit for development work and I found it super easy to install. It supports Linux (debian and redhat among others) and Windows. It comes with MySQL and SQLlite with the phpMySQLAdmin admin tool, PHP and perl for development). The best thing about it is Apache, MySQL and PHP are all pre-configured. There's even an FTP server included.
I'm not too sure about security though as I never went live using it, but if you read up on server (esp. web server) security, you can configure it pretty easily from what I understand.