Progresss in Wordpress

I honestly don't know why this is turning out to be so complicated. Although I've made some progress, I'm by no means there yet.
It just seems that there's a barrier around every corner that needs to bee investigated to resolve. Is it that the guides are poorly written or that I'm too stupid to follow them.
Haven't made up my mind on this yet.
In any event, I do believe that a clear, unequivocal, step-by-step guide is what I'll need if I let this drop and come back to it in a few months.
So, even though I'm not at the stage wheree I can go publishing my blogs in WP, I think I'm close, so I provide a guide as to how I got this far:

1.

sudo tasksel install lamp-server

Add a password for MySQL root when asked. You'll need this later in the install
2.

echo "ServerName localhost" | sudo tee /etc/apache2/conf.d/fqdn

to prevent the error

apache2: Could not determine the server's fully qualified domain name, using 127.0.0.1 for ServerName

3. Create a folder ~/public_html/ by navigating to the ~ directory and issuing

sudo mkdir public_html

4.

sudo cp /etc/apache2/sites-available/default /etc/apache2/sites-available/mysite

5. Edit the new site, mysite, by

sudo gedit /etc/apache2/sites-available/mysite

and then change the line

DocumentRoot /var/www/

to

DocumentRoot /home/paul/public_html

and change

to

then save the modified /etc/apache2/sites-available/mysite file.
6. Now de-activate the default file and activate the new mysite with

sudo a2dissite default && sudo a2ensite mysite

7. Now, restart apache2 with

sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart

8. To test the new site, do

echo 'Hello! It is working!' > /home/user/public_html/index.html

and browse to

http://localhost

9.

sudo gedit /etc/php5/apache2/php.ini

and change the line

memory_limit 16M

to some higher value (I used 64 MB)
10.Enter into MySQL with

mysql -u root -p

11. Create a mysql database with

mysql> CREATE DATABASE database1;

12. Create a new user with

mysql> GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON *.* TO 'paul'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY '***password***' WITH GRANT OPTION;

(items to be changed are bolded)
13. Leave MySQL with

mysql> \q

14. Edit /etc/apache2/apache2.conf with

sudo gedit /etc/apache2/apache2.conf

and change lines 199 and 202 to reflect the appropriate user/group.
In my case these lines became

LogFormat "%h %l %u %t \"%r\" %>s %b \"%{Referer}i\" \"%{paul-Agent}i\"" combined

and

LogFormat "%{paul-agent}i" agent

15.

...........to be continued