Installing WP Super Cache should be fairly straight forward. Simply visit http://your.ip.address.com/wp-admin/plugin-install.php and install it directly through the WordPress admin panel. Next, there are a few things you need to configure.

In Settings > Permalink you need to select a link structure. WP Super Cache will not work with the default. Now lets activate the plugin. Go to the Plugins tab and click on Activate directly beneath WP Super Cache. Then click on WP Super Cache Settings and select Enable Caching

There are a few more tweaks we can make. In the WP Super Cache Settings, click on the Advanced tab and check Cache hits to this website for quick access and Use mod_rewrite to serve cache files.

There are also a few Apache modules that you will want to make sure are enabled:

a2enmod rewrite
a2enmod mime
a2enmod headers
a2enmod expires
service apache2 restart

You should now be all set to go. Of course there are a lot more options you can experiment with, but just this basic setup should get you going.

Don’t cache pages for known users. is another setting you might want to enable so that you make sure you don't get stale content while developing.

W3 Total Cache should be more or less just as easy to get running.