Alright, here is another one. Liferay 5.2.3 on Fedora 12 with Tomcat 6 (Fedora version) and an external mysql database. Enjoy!
cd /tmp
wget http://downloads.sourceforge.net/project/lportal/Liferay%20Portal/5.2.3/liferay-portal-tomcat-6.0-5.2.3.zip?use_mirror=surfnet
wget http://downloads.sourceforge.net/lportal/liferay-portal-dependencies-5.2.3.zip
wget http://downloads.sourceforge.net/project/lportal/Liferay%20Portal/5.2.3/liferay-portal-5.2.3.war?use_mirror=ovh
unzip liferay-portal-dependencies-5.2.3.zip
unzip liferay-portal-tomcat-6.0-5.2.3.zip
cd /usr/share/tomcat6/conf
cp /tmp/liferay-portal-5.2.3/tomcat-6.0.18/conf/jaas.config .
cd /usr/share/tomcat6/conf/Catalina/localhost/
cp /tmp/liferay-portal-5.2.3/tomcat-6.0.18/conf/Catalina/localhost/ROOT.xml .
cd /usr/share/tomcat6/lib
mkdir ext
cd ext
cp /tmp/liferay-portal-5.2.3/tomcat-6.0.18/lib/ext/* .
cp /tmp/liferay-portal-dependencies-5.2.3/* .
cp /tmp/liferay-portal-5.2.3/tomcat-6.0.18/webapps/ROOT/WEB-INF/lib/xercesImpl.jar .
cd /usr/share/tomcat6/webapps/
mkdir ROOT
cd ROOT
unzip /tmp/liferay-portal-5.2.3.war
vi /usr/share/tomcat6/conf/tomcat6.conf
JAVA_OPTS="-Xmx1024m -XX:MaxPermSize=256m -Dfile.encoding=UTF8 -Duser.timezone=GMT -Djava.security.auth.login.config=$CATALINA_HOME/conf/jaas.config -Dorg.apache.catalina.loader.WebappClassLoader.ENABLE_CLEAR_REFERENCES=false"
vi /usr/share/tomcat6/conf/catalina.properties
common.loader=${catalina.home}/lib,${catalina.home}/lib/*.jar,${catalina.home}/lib/ext/*.jar
vi /usr/share/tomcat6/webapps/ROOT/WEB-INF/classes/portal-ext.properties
# Set the Host name
#
# MySQL
#
jdbc.default.driverClassName=com.mysql.jdbc.Driver
jdbc.default.url=jdbc:mysql://db.server.com/lportal?useUnicode=true&characterEncoding=UTF-8&useFastDateParsing=false
jdbc.default.username=lportal
jdbc.default.password=lportal
schema.run.enabled=true
schema.run.minimal=true
captcha.check.portal.create_account=false
last.modified.check=false
theme.css.fast.load=true
javascript.fast.load=true
com.liferay.portal.servlet.filters.layoutcache.LayoutCacheFilter=true
#Turn off Hibernate Stuff
hibernate.bytecode.use_reflection_optomizer=false
hibernate.cache.use_minimal_puts=false
hibernate.cache.use_query_cache=false
hibernate.cache.use_second_level_cache=false
hibernate.cache.use_structured_entries=false
#Set Up Some Performance Tags
theme.css.fast.load=true
theme.images.fast.load=true
theme.portlet.decorate.default=true
theme.porlet.sharing.default=true
portlet.css.enabled=false
Now download the latest mysql connector from www.mysql.com and put it into the /usr/share/tomcat6/lib directory.
You should also consider setting up the mod_jk modules for Apache.