PHP development server troubleshooting!

[feathertail]

Okay, this is like my fifth time trying to get LAMP set up on Ubuntu, and yes, that includes using XAMPP. (All I want to do is practice my PHP so I can write WordPress plugins! *sob* Why does the world's easiest language have to be so hard to set up?)

*cough* Anyway. I used these instructions this time, after uninstalling XAMPP and what were hopefully all traces of my last attempt at doing this. I'm not using Netbeans -- gedit is okay with me -- and I didn't get any error messages or anything, so I thought I'd actually gotten it set up and set to use /home/feathertail/PHP as the document root.

I put a test file in there, browsed to /localhost and got this:

Forbidden

You don't have permission to access /testphp.php on this server.

Apache/2.2.17 (Ubuntu) Server at localhost Port 80

And for some reason it has the XAMPP logo as its favicon.

Can anyone point me in the direction of finally solving this once and for all?