Use the Unified installer

I think that the Unified installer is the fastest way to get a Plone Instance up and running for development

I'm assuming you already have the dependencies in place.

 wget http://launchpad.net/plone/3.1/3.1.5.1/+download/Plone-3.1.5.1-UnifiedInstaller.tgz

 tar xvfz Plone-3.1.5.1-UnifiedInstaller.tgz

./install.sh standalone --with-python=/usr/bin/python2.4

The result will be an installation in /opt/Plone-3.1

Configure your security groups appropriately

FIXME.. need more info here