Getting Solr to play nice with Tomcat on Ubuntu was an interesting journey, I almost gave up entirely at one point. I'm compiling this how-to from tips I got from multiple websites. I'll try to make as complete a list as I can remember at the end of this post.

I setup Lighttpd 1.4.18 with FastCGI support for PHP on my development server last night just to see if it's gotten any better since I last tried it. So far so good, at least setup and install went much better this time. Ubuntu has had Lighttpd in the repos since Dapper (although only Gutsy and Hardy are up to date.) Setting up FastCGI was easy this time around, I didn't get any server errors at all, although it's possible I only owe this to better understanding of the documentation. Just for kicks, I also installed eAccelerator, which is a PHP op-code cache that I've been using on my primary server for a few months along with some other performance tweaks (mostly various types of caching.)