enabling gzip on my ubuntu box
The good news - mod_deflate is already in apache2-common.
The not-so-bad news - you need to add the symlink to mods-enabled.
The somewhat worse news - even in 2005, there’s potentially browser compat issues depending on how far back you want to support.
http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.0/mod/mod_deflate.html
I did the “impatient” route listed and added “AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/html text/plain text/xml” to my 3 virtualhost stanzas.