Not sure why you cringe at Cpanel - I LOVE Cpanel, found it after years of using Ensim, which is the most painful control panel in history. Cpanel makes everything easy, and since I started using (over a year ago) I've had zero downtime because of botched php, apache, mysql or control panel updates. Ensim updates always crashed my system, and Ensim made it very difficult to update Apache or Php or Mysql.

Of course, if I had YOUR knowhow, I likely wouldn't need a control panel of any kind :)

Didn't know that no one's heard of suphp, won't likely bother to touch the wiki then because it will just serve to confuse.

To turn it on in Cpanel takes less than 60 seconds, and you can do it without recompiling (at least on the latest version which was just released - Cpanel Accelerated) by going to the apache config and clicking on the "Configure SuEXEC and PHP" link. You can then choose to have php run by cgi, dso or suphp. Takes about 30 seconds to rewrite your php.ini and you're good to go.