Greetings

I'm a PC enthusiast and hacker since the days of the Radio Shack TRS-80. I'm only now looking to make my first foray into Linux. I'm pretty good at dealing with computer headaches, though at this stage of my hackerness I try to avoid them.

Primarily It will be used as a server in my home development environment. I'd like to run Apache, MySQL, php, and maybe some server side java. It should also serve as as a personal PC in a pinch.

I'm really not sure which of many free distributions I should go with. I've looked over some of the options, and am leaning towards either Fedora, http://fedoraproject.org/ by the RedHat people, or Debian http://www.debian.org/ . Both seem like established names with sound backing.

Any thoughts? Are these suitable for the purpose?

I'll be running it on an older PC, a PIII 733 with 512 MB RAM and 10 GB hard drive. probably will dual boot it with Windows XP or 2000.

I'd definitely go with Debian Lenny (latest stable release) for a server, apt is a god send, miles above yum (RH's default package management).

If you fancy a desktop environment, perhaps one of the *buntu flavours would be better suited, xubuntu tends to be the lightest, but I can't imagine ubuntu / kubuntu will be too bad on that hardware.

You can of course also install a desktop environment on Debian Lenny, I've just found the *buntu desktop experience to be far superior.

Thanks bud. I also got some re-inforcement from the fact that linux.org used Debian as the example for their Linux install course. I've hear a lot about the desktop experience of Ubuntu, but like I said it's primarily for a server. I also hope to acquire some marketable skills from this little endeavor. But for situations where I do need to use it as a desktop, it sounds like I will need to specifically install a desktop environment? I suppose that is something I can turn on and off?

I did notice that there are 30-40 cd image files. at about 650 MB a pop. I imagine there's a lot of stuff there I won't need, but that's enough to make me want to go with a minimal download then complete the install over the internet.

I don't imagine there's any issues with connecting a Debian machine via wireless to a Linksys router?

Wireless isn't always easy to setup on linux, depends on the wireless card, Atheros and Prism offers the widest support. It rarely works out of the can though.

Go with the minimal install, then tailor it with aptitude / apt-get.

I agree with you
you are right

I would go with CentOS over your two choices. CentOS is runs fast and is used by several hosting companies. It is also very easy to install a LAMP setup on it:

http://www.howtoforge.com/centos-5.1-serve...s-ftp-ispconfig

Thanks, I'll check it out. I'm already started on my Debian install, but I consider this a dry run, all options are still open.

About the only issue I ran into with the install was the size of the swap partition that was assigned. It was 477 MB, even though I have read elsewhere that a rule of thumb is twice physical RAM. I have 512 MB, so I was not sure what to make of 477, but like I said this is a dry run, so I went with the default. I suppose I can adjust the size of the swap partition after the fact. Setting the size manually involved some choices I didn't feel qualified to make.

There might be a guide for LAMP on Debian at How To Forge.

Yeah, OK thanks I see now that Lamp is right up my alley. It seems to present, or at least facilitate the "whole package", all the stuff i'd be looking for to create a web hoist environment". I'll keep that in mind, first I'll be spending some time with Linux basics, and networking. No problem recognizing my wireless network card, well I don't think, the install said it recognized atheros when i fact it is a D-Link. However what is not detected, yet, it the wireless network I want to connect to. I suppose recognizing atheros instead of D-Link may or may not be the problem. So I'll be looking into maybe overriding what the install detected. IN the meantime when I need to get connected I'l use a wired connection.

As a matter of fact they did have instructions for Debian. With apt, there was maybe half dozen lines of instruction. Dead simple, much faster and easier than it would be to build a "WIMP" server.