Apache setup is pretty easy: there are any number of sources for configuring your default apache installation to work.
Bookworm requires files in a web directory: for convenience, it's much easier if you name that folder the same as the name of the database. (So http://benschmidt.org/SOTU maps to the SOTU database). If using the D3 web interface, that should be sufficient to get you started (although the default search may need to be changed); if using the polish highcharts setup, some additional work may be necessary.
For a small Bookworm, the exact version of the server doesn't matter: for a large one, some features like subquery caching, implemented in mariadb, greatly increases speed.
To install on Ubuntu 14.04, some strange invocations are required: sudo apt-get install mariadb-server-core-10.0 after setting up your repositories.
Bookworm uses a heavily customized my.cnf file for MySQL, though, in order to facilitate the creation of large b-tree indexes. This mostly involves things like allowing obscenely large temporary tables which makes index creation an order of magnitude faster. (Although still quite slow on a large Bookworm). We do not know of any substantial performance hits for this file. (For instance, MySQL is still quite snappy as a wordpress host).
There are some scripts located in setup/MySQLsetup/ that rewrite your configuration file to include the specifications; back up your old my.cnf file first, because it will be rewritten. (And you'll lose things like comments). You can also make the changes by hand.
You'll also need to set up mysql so that you can create tables. The best way to test this is to do the following. First, in the shell type mysql. That should log you on. (If you have problems here, you may need to edit your ~/.my.cnf file.) Then in MySQL type:
CREATE DATABASE testing123;
DROP DATABASE testing123;
If those fail, you don't have appropriate privileges to use MySQL on your server.