Howtoforge posted a tutorial about installing Magento 1.6.0.0 on a Debian Squeeze or Ubuntu 11.04

This tutorial shows how you can install and run Magento 1.6.0.0 on a Debian Squeeze or Ubuntu 11.04 system that has nginx installed instead of Apache (LEMP = Linux + nginx (pronounced "engine x") + MySQL + PHP). Magento is an open-source, feature-rich ecommerce platform; I will use the Magento Community Edition here which is licensed under an open source certified license (OSL v3.0). nginx is a HTTP server that uses much less resources than Apache and delivers pages a lot of faster, especially static files.

  Running Magento 1.6.0.0 On Nginx (LEMP) on Debian Squeeze/Ubuntu 11.04