After all the troubles that seem to have plagued the Ubuntu One syncing service over the last few months (does the desktop to server contacts sync work yet???) I have decided to go it alone and install my own Funambol server. This “how to” is based on Raphael Schmid’s article here, with a few observations of my own thrown in for good measure 
First make sure that Java is correctly installed:
~$ sudo aptitude install sun-java6-bin sun-java6-jre
and then download the correct 32 or 64 bit package from the Funambol website here. Alternatively download the 8.5.2 release directly to the server from this website:
