I installed the alfresco-community package (after activating the "partner" repository in /etc/apt/sources.list), and almost everything works fine.
Things working out-of-the-box:
Share, Check that Sun Java 6 is actually the active Java, otherwise OpenJDK could be used, and that gives errors
Explorer
All the intergration things like openoffice, swf2pdf etc
Things not working:
CIFS, I had to add the non-privileged ports in alfresco-global.properties, and then set port forwarding
Sharepoint, it's not installed, and I guess installing it would break future updates of the package.
Will these 2 things be fixed in future updates of the alfresco-community package? Apart from these two things it's really a breeze to install alfresco, as simple as any package on Ubuntu.
Is there a better reference for for FTP configuration.
The objective is to have Alfresco running on an Linux Amazon EC2 instance with Persistent Storage and S3, so that colleagues in US and overseas contractors could access the system - FTP being the only requirement - no CFIS share drive needed.