I read on the Development Seed blog about a New Release: Aegir 0.4 Alpha 5, and since aWebFactory finds itself in the midst of retooling (Git! Aegir! … more soon), I knew this was a great moment for biting the bullet and stop reading about Aegir and actually installing and enjoying all that hard work the devs had been doing.
The post includes a link to mig5’s incredible video (see below for References and links), which also basically follows the step-by-step instructions found in the officially supported INSTALL.txt and the first part of this article basically consists of the steps I took following along. It took me about two hours to install Aegir and make my first use of it (deploying some new staging sites), as well as writing this post.