Thanks Paul. Following your recommendation, I set up a Ubuntu 2.10 installation today and installed all the required dependencies (which takes a while..). I got it working with some effort.
Tomorrow I'll try applying sample templates to the site.

There was one problem I had to work around. The Campsite install script got to STEP 3: Installing Campsite and failed. Here is what the tail of install_log said:
---
chown -R www-data:www-data /usr/local/campsite/www-common/html/*
chmod -R u+rw /usr/local/campsite/www-common/html/*
chmod -R g+r /usr/local/campsite/www-common/html/*
/usr/bin/pear install --soft Archive_Tar Console_Getopt XML_RPC PEAR Net_Socket
No valid packages found
install failed
make[2]: *** [install] Error 1
make[2]: Leaving directory `/home/ryanm/campsite/implementation/management'
make[1]: *** [install] Error 1
make[1]: Leaving directory `/home/ryanm/campsite/implementation'
make: *** [install] Error 2
---
The install script should've been fine here because those Pear packages were already installed and up-to-date. Witness:
# pear list
Installed packages, channel pear.php.net:
=========================================
Package Version State
Archive_Tar 1.3.1 stable
Console_Getopt 1.2 stable
File 1.2.2 stable
File_Find 1.2.0 stable
HTML_Template_IT 1.1.3 stable
HTTP_Client 1.0.0 stable
HTTP_Request 1.3.0 stable
Net_Socket 1.0.6 stable
Net_URL 1.0.14 stable
Net_UserAgent_Detect 2.1.0 stable
PEAR 1.4.4 stable
XML_Parser 1.2.7 stable
XML_RPC 1.4.4 stable
XML_Util 1.1.1 stable

Anywho, I worked around it by editing implementation/management/Makefile and commenting out the Pear installation/upgrade lines. The install completed after that.

Thanks
Ryan


Paul Baranowski Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Campsite only runs on Linux and FreeBSD. The
> campsite team uses Ubuntu
> Linux to develop and test on. We recommend this
> distribution for its
> ease of maintainability. It will work on either
> Ubuntu 5.04 (Hoary) or
> 5.10 (Breezy).
>
> It is also known to work on the following Linux
> distributions:
> (From the manual page:
> )
>
> Mandrake 10 and 10.1; RedHat 9.0; Fedora Core 1
> and 3; Debian 3.1 (Sarge).
>
> - Paul
>
>
> phorum@c
> 1;de.campw
> 7;re.org wrote:
> > Author: obstreperousness Link:
> >
> >
> --------------------------------------------------
> ------------------------------
> >
> >
> > I have been trying to install Campsite off
> and on for a couple of
> > months. I have tried using the past few 2.3.x
> releases and various
> > SVN snapshots. I've tried a number of
> operating systems. Each time I
> > ran into difficulties of one sort or another.
> >
> > I would like to know this: in short, what is
> the operating system and
> > version most compatible with Campsite 2.3.3?
> What versions of Apache,
> > MySQL, and PHP are most compatible? I have a
> strong preference for
> > FreeBSD, but mostly I just want to get the
> thing running reliably.
> > Where should I start?
> >
> > Thanks Ryan
> >
> >