I encountered a little bit of a hitch while trying to install phpmyadmin on my ubuntu devbox. 

I issued the standard apt command apt-get install phpmyadmin

and went through with runnig dpkg-reconfigure -plow phpmyadmin

Yet I could not access the install from http://localhost/phpmyadmin

The solution was that the symbolic link was missing. 

 Run this command

sudo ln -s /usr/share/phpmyadmin /var/www

That solved the issue.