In the past the recommendation for Zope/Plone on Debian was: "Use the source, Luke!"

Well, I can't say this is true anymore. For specialized hosting environment you will still need the source, but for most use-cases etch gives you a powerful setup.

Plone 2.5 on Debian Etch:

Getting Plone and its dependencies:

Become root and run:

apt-get install plone-site

The package asks you for a admin user, a password and the port you want plone to run on. By default its port is 8081. Remember your changes!

Starting Zope/Plone:

/etc/init.d/zope2.9 start

Create a Plone site:

Go to your browser and type http://localhost:9673/manage' and log in. You are now in the so called ZMI (Zope Management Interface).

To create a Plone site, you need to add it to your zope instance within the ZMI: Use the drop-down at the right, choose Plone Site and klick add. Give your Plone Site at least an ID (do not use fancy characters) for example myplone.

Congratulations: your Plone instance is available at http://localhost:9673/myplone.

Plone 3.0 on Debian Etch:

Zope 2.10 and Plone 3 are not part of Etch (they weren't available at the time of the release), but you can install them from the Debian Backports, where the Debian Zope Team upload the last releases of Zope and Plone backported to etch. In short, add the following line to your /etc/apt/sources.list file:

  deb http://www.backports.org/debian etch-backports main

At this point, run apt-get update to update the list of the available packages. Now just apt-get install -t etch-backports plone3-site and follow the instructions: the system will ask for an user name, a password and a port.

Background infos:

Where do I find all the files?

/etc/zope2.9/plone-site/

/var/lib/zope2.9/instance/plone-site

Available tools

dzhandle

major utility to handle Debian/Ubuntu Zope packages, command line utility, more see man dzhandle and /usr/share/doc/zope-common/README.Debian.gz. Use this as the one-and-only tool to manage your instances (Zope and ZEO servers).