I have started a series of tutorials to describe how to set up a Drupal development environment on Ubuntu 8.04 LTS (Hardy Heron) LAMP server. This LAMP server can be a virtual machine over VMware server.

Session 1: Setting up the LAMP server as a virtual machine
Session 2: Additional components to the LAMP server: webmin, phpMyAdmin, NFS, PHP GD library
Session 3: Configuring the LAMP server: networking, NFS, firewall
Session 4: Drupal install

There will be http, ssh and Webmin access to the LAMP server. The source files remain at the clients (or on the host of VMware), and will be accessible by the LAMP development server over NFS. At the development server, we will have Apache 2.2.3, Mysql 5.0.38, PHP 5.2.1 and some other utils like OpenSSH, Webmin 1.420 and phpMyAdmin 2.11.3. Version numbers may differ in time.