Building in Ubuntu (Xampp)

Well I've done the groundwork to get the development environment going using eclipse and drupal. It was a bit of a struggle, but I think I have a handle on it now. I just happen to stumble upon an easier way to get another development environment up and running with much less headache and mess. The secret?? Xampp!! You go to that site and see a groovy chic having fun on the page! She's probably happy because xampp is soooo easy! Basically, you download the xampp package, install it, and start it. That's it! It's simple instructions for anybody from Linux to Windows. When I first installed and started it, it started running instantly and I didn't know what to do with it. Now that I've started playing with it using PHP, I see how much functionality and control I have. The best part is how simple it is to stop certain things. By typing in simple commands like "stop Apache," (just in case you have your own version of Apache)it really stops it without hurting the rest of your environment! I would say Xampp is a good product to play with for the beginning and/or intermediate developer. Also, if you don't like it then you can easily uninstall it without messing up the rest of your operating system. It doesn't attach itself to anything in your system.