What they don't tell you.

I have been battling lately, trying to install a lamp server on ubuntu. It is quite interesting, particularly, because packages keep on installing themselves badly. God knows why, but i've had to remove and reinstall packages more than once. The actual command is somewhat cryptic, a simple remove isn't enough.

apt-get remove --purge
will remove any conf files that aren't making anything work.

apt-get install --reinstall
will do pretty much nothing