Well there's a lot of easier ways for those a little nervous of installing things to get PHP up and running.....

Although I appreciate that you're talking Debian here I thought I might just throw in my two penneth and let you know that RPM based stuff is most easily customised by visiting http://rpms.arvin.dk/php/

Mr Troels Arvin has built his own set of rpms which (rather than Zend's idea of one big beasty of an rpm) allow you to only include the functionality that you want.....

Cheers,

Dave