As a basis for the majority of new installs, I use the Developer Side base system on windows as it provides basically everything. Their site also provides excellent resources for help and support as well as how to do things on Linux

For a Linux install, the core RPMs seem to work fine The linux RMP installs tend to complete with a basic working copy of what you installed and as long as you do it in the right order things are generally fine.

Apache -> MySQL -> PHP -> anything else you need.