I spent a couple nights working through all the blog posts and stackoverflow pages I could find. I pieced together all the working tutorials to create this one: http://simiancreative.com/2013/09/22/tomcat7-solr-4-4-ubuntu-12-04/
This only answers part of your question. I do not have examples of indexing mysql tables. I plan on doing a tutorial on rails and sunspot integration for a production environment.