We build most of our sites using paster (versus using the Unified Installer). Here are some simple notes we had for doing that (more information on using paster with plone can be found in the Plone documentation):

This how-to assumes you have ZopeSkel installed.

• Create a directory to house the plone installation.

mkdir /path/to/plone/install/directory

• Use paster to install buildout files.

paster create -t plone3_buildout /path/to/plone/install/directory

• Change your working directory to the new zope install.

cd /path/to/zope/install/directory

• Bootstrap the system.

python bootstrap.py

• Run buildout.

./bin/buildout

• That's it.  Now, just start zope/plone.

./bin/instance start

• Or run in it the foreground (and in debug mode).

./bin/instance fg