The following instructions are for setting up a local Aegir environment for development using a virtualbox machine. First, you must have a basic working Ubuntu installation on your virtualbox machine. Note that if you are using Ubuntu 10.4 or later, you may want to use special measures to downgrade from php 5.3, which doesn't play well with Drupal.
Background
Project Zaynab is a two week youth training project in Portland Oregon, whose purpose is to train youth to begin leading classes in their own communities for the spiritual education of children ages 5-9 and of younger youth ages 11-14. The project's schedule called for 9 days of intensive training at the Beaverton Oregon Bahá'í Center, followed by another 5 days of training and service, assisted by a resource person, either in the Portland area or in their home communities.
Tags: acquia, artisteer, Baha'i, blocks, blog, case studies, cck, community, content access, custom theme, drupal, embedded media field, emfield, feedAPI, flickr, image gallery, imagecache, lightbox, php, taxonomy access control, twitpocalypse, twitter, views, youtube
Maybe you're having the same problem that I just did:
# warning: include_once(./) [function.include-once]: failed to open stream: Permission denied in ...\theme.inc on line 155.
# warning: include_once() [function.include]: Failed opening './' for inclusion (include_path='...') in ...\theme.inc on line 155.
If so, check your theme's .info file - you may have misspelled the theme engine. It needs to be as follows:
engine = phptemplate
Make sure it's all in lowercase.