Install Tomcat in Ubuntu is very easy. We can either install manually or with help of apt-get install.

Apt-get Install

1) Find a correct tomcat package to install

sudo apt-cache search tomcat

2) Install all Tomcat package with following command

sudo apt-get install tomcat5.5-webapps
sudo apt-get install tomcat5.5-admin
sudo apt-get install tomcat5.5

3) Done

apt-get help Ubuntu to configure almost everything and create a script put inside init.d folder for Tomcat auto startup script. we can start/stop/restart Tomcat with following command

/etc/init.d/tomcat5.5 start
/etc/init.d/tomcat5.5 stop
/etc/init.d/tomcat5.5 restart

apt-get help to create a share folder in /usr/share also, please access

cd /usr/share/tomcat5.5

and issue a ls -lh in /usr/share/tomcat5.5 to find out the rest of the Tomcat location.

drwxr-xr-x bin
drwxr-xr-x common
lrwxrwxrwx conf -> /etc/tomcat5.5
lrwxrwxrwx doc -> ../doc/tomcat5.5
lrwxrwxrwx logs -> /var/lib/tomcat5.5/logs
drwxr-xr-x server
lrwxrwxrwx shared -> /var/lib/tomcat5.5/shared
lrwxrwxrwx temp -> /var/lib/tomcat5.5/temp
lrwxrwxrwx webapps -> /var/lib/tomcat5.5/webapps
lrwxrwxrwx work -> /var/lib/tomcat5.5/work

Manually Install

This is even more easy that apt-get

1) Visit http://tomcat.apache.org/ to download Tomcat

2) Unzip it with tar -zxvf Tomcatxxx.tar

tar -zxvf apache-tomcat-6.0.16.tar.gz

3) No make or configuration required, just change to tomcat bin folder to start or stop Tomcat 

:~/Desktop/apache-tomcat-6.0.16/bin$ sh startup.sh
:~/Desktop/apache-tomcat-6.0.16/bin$ sh shutdown.sh

4) Done

Personally i more prefer to install application manually, because it give full control of where application folder should be store.