Howtoforge published a tutorial about installing Joomla 1.7 on Nginx (LEMP) on Debian Squeeze/Ubuntu 11.10

This tutorial shows how you can install and run a Joomla 1.7 web site on a Debian Squeeze or Ubuntu 11.10 system that has nginx installed instead of Apache (LEMP = Linux + nginx (pronounced "engine x") + MySQL + PHP). nginx is a HTTP server that uses much less resources than Apache and delivers pages a lot of faster, especially static files.

  Running Joomla 1.7 On Nginx (LEMP) On Debian Squeeze/Ubuntu 11.10