Installing XAMPP and Drupal on Xubuntu 11.10

I'm evaluating CiviCRM, a contact relationship manager which is installed as a module in either Joomla or Drupal.
I could install Apache web server in Ubuntu by using apt-get, but then I will have little control over the versions of software installed, so I'm starting with a custom install of XAMPP. Visit
http://www.apachefriends.org/en/xampp-linux.html
, and download the the latest version of software. Then open a console shell and enter:

sudo tar xvfz ~/Downloads/xampp-linux-1.7.7.tar.gz -C /opt

That's it. I also made the following changes to the /opt/lampp/etc/php.ini file:

display_errors = Off display_startup_errors = Off output_buffering = Off

These 'production' settings are recommended by the Joomla install process and prevent warning messages from displaying all over your web pages. Now start XAMPP:

sudo /opt/lampp/lampp start

Test your installation by pointing your browser to localhost.

Now to install Joomla, visit joomla.org, and download the latest version. Because I don't know Joomla I'm going to create two sites - a reference site named joomla_demo, and a working site named joomla_crm

sudo mkdir /opt/lampp/htdocs/joomla_demo
sudo unzip ~/Downloads/Joomla_1.7.3-Stable-Full_Package.zip -d /opt/lampp/htdocs/joomla_demo
sudo chmod -R 755 /opt/lampp/htdocs/joomla_demo
sudo chown -R nobody:nogroup /opt/lampp/htdocs/joomla_demo
sudo mkdir /opt/lampp/htdocs/joomla_crm
sudo unzip ~/Downloads/Joomla_1.7.3-Stable-Full_Package.zip -d /opt/lampp/htdocs/joomla_crm
sudo chmod -R 755 /opt/lampp/htdocs/joomla_crm
sudo chown -R nobody:nogroup /opt/lampp/htdocs/joomla_crm

Now, browse to localhost/joomla_crm, and follow the installation instructions. For database name, I entered 'joomla', and for prefix, I entered 'crm_'. Note that I could also have used 2 separate databases.
To install CicivCRM, I enter my joomla_crm site as administrator, and select Extension Manager. The instructions are to enter the sourceforge url into the Install URL field. But sourceforge doesn't cooperate. Instead, I install if from my own local web server:

sudo cp ~/Downloads/civicrm-4.0.8-joomla.zip /opt/lampp/htdocs

Now, for Install URL, enter http://localhost/civicrm-4.0.8-joomla.zip And the install is successful. Next, I'll create my evaluation sites for Drupal.