if you know how, its very easy. there are a few prerequisites though:

• windows XP Pro / Windows Vista (not sure which edition, you need a vista that has IIS 7)
• IIS 6 / IIS 7 ( if you are using IIS 7 on vista, make sure to also install the IIS 6 legacy tools, which allow you to have a classic app pool)
• ASP.NET 2.0, ASP.NET AJAX Extensions
• MS SQL Express 2005

The order of installation is important. If you installed the ASP.NET frameworks prior to IIS, or if you reinstalled IIS, then you need to enable .NET to be used for IIS. This MS KB article tells you how to do that: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/306005

next do this:

• unzip the source version in a directory of your liking :)
• create a new virtual directory (or application in IIS 7), and point it to the website folder of the source distro
• make sure that the IIS anonymous user has read rights in that folder, and the IIS ASP.NET worker process identity (ASPNET on XP and NETWORK SERVICE on Vista) has modify rights on the website folder (and everything below). To be honest.. to spead up things for local setup, i often give "Everyone" full control over the complete solution..
  • You can set folder access rights by rightclicking a folder, selecting "Properties" and go to the "Security" tab. If you dont see a security tab, then your windows XP is set to "Simple File Sharing. You can deactivate that by selecting "Folder Options" from the control panel (or Tools>Folder options from an explorer window). Go to the View tab, and deselect "use simple file sharing"
• Rename developement.config or release.config in the website folder to web.config
• open the dotnetnuke.sln file with notepad, and change the url from http://localhost/dotnetnuke_2 to whatever you named your virtual directory
• save the dotnetnuke.sln file, and open it with vs2005
• build the solution
• press ctrl-F5, this will start the website
• in the wizard choose the settings for the database (you can create your own db first in sql express, make sure that the user used to access the db has dbo rights)
• finish the wizard.. and voila.. your site is running....

sounds hard? .. writing it down makes is seem hard, but considering all that is done by the dnn installer, and comparing to other asp.net applications.. this installation is a bliss. Mind you: IMHO, everything up untill the point that you first open the solution, is all just ASP.NEt application setup, not specific for DNN...... So blame MS if it is too difficult :)

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When you named your virtual directory "dnn", you should replace http://localhost/dotnetnuke_2 with http://localhost/dnn