I just installed Ubuntu 12.04 LTS and Rserve/FastRWeb per my own instructions, below in the blog. Installing cairo (required for package Cairo) was more work than I remembered, but perhaps I just didn't remember.
However, I had a real gotcha when testing Simon's example1.png.R: the page displayed with a black background, the red points visible but the axes (in black) almost completely invisible. I was sure it was my fault. Nope.
Turns out to be an issue with the newest Mozilla, and has an easy fix:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/old-default-image-style/
I hope that helps someone.