Steps in installing a smaple Magento

This is a list of steps needed in the process of installing a sample magento site.

I will be assuming that you have WAMP / LAMP already installed.

1. go to http://www.magentocommerce.com/download and download magento and the magento smaple data. (versions don't need to match - actually the sample data is from 2008 at the time of writing).
2. deploy the content of the magento installation to a magentoVirtualRoot directory on you web server
3. create an empty database (e.g. magento_db)
4. add the files in the media folder from the sample data to those from the magento installation
5. make sure you set up and required new hosts / DNS entries if such are needed.
6. copy the sql text from the sample data into the sql tab of your mysql's phpadmin for the database you created on step 2 and execute it.
7. ONLY AFTER STEP 5 IS DONE - go to your browser and surf to http://www.yourdomain.com/magentoVirtualRoot and complete the installation proccess.
8. go to http://www.yourdomain.com/magentoVirtualRoot/admin or whatever url you assigned for the backend and go to system-index management and reindex all your data.
9. go to the front end of you new smaple shop at http://www.yourdomain.com/magentoVirtualRoot and enjoy.

please not that some steps are not mandatory and some details might have been left out, if you think I left out something really important, feel free to comment.