well i just tried out subsonic last night and i made pretty good progress. i went with the "WAR" file option on installation. I already have apache2 running on that box, and installed tomcat5.5, the java virtual machine for the server. it is set up to run on port 8180 by default on ubuntu server (installed from the ubuntu repositories). once tomcat is installed, i opened port 8180 on the firewall, modified it's config to disable tomcat security as instructed on a howto i followed (here:
http://onlyubuntu.blogspot.com/2008/09/ ... hardy.html ), created the subsonic directory under /var and changed the ownership for the tomcat55 user. i also downloaded subsonic-3.4 and unzipped it, placing the subsonic.war file (the web archive - the site in a bundle, very nice) in the /var/lib/tomcat55/webapps directory. AT FIRST it didn't want to run because the subversion.war file was not accessible to tomcat. i don't think the howto mentioned that. but i changed the owner of the subversion.war to tomcat55:nogroup and it works now.
caveat: i am having a problem with tomcat crashing and can't figure out why... but i can repeat it ad nauseum... i am on 3.4 so i tried 3.5 but got errors.. that is why i am here on the forums, to work that out. but other than that it looks really nice. i have managed to stream transcoded music already... had to install several programs on the server (flac, vorbis-tools, faad, lame, etc) but it was not hard to do since they're all in the repos already.
so for my system i access
http://myserveripaddress:8180/subsonic from my browser
remember, you install tomcat over apache2 then you install the subsonic.war file in tomcat's webapps dir and that's the gist of it.
good luck