[thelist] nice easy Unix distro installation?

[Burhan Khalid]

On Sun, 2004-08-29 at 22:26, Roger H. wrote:
> Hello 'Volters,
> 
> I'd really like put together my own L.A.M.P. system mainly for
> experimenting, and web testing.
> 
> I DO know a little unix and have taken some beginning PHP courses, but what
> I DON'T know is the best way, (cheaply) to set up my own system.
> 
> I have been googling, but I was wondering if you folks have any suggestions
> for a downloadable unix distro, for an old system I want to set up as my
> pretend server. Something I can install MySQL, PHP, etc. Hopefully something
> I could just burn on to a cd, and load to the dino computer.

(I'll assume you mean Linux, and not Unix -- since there are two very
different things).

Since you are new to the wonderful world of Linux, perhaps you should go
with a package based distribution (RedHat, Mandrake, SuSE) than a
source-based distribution (Gentoo).

Linux installation has come a long way in terms of user-friendliness. 
For beginners I usually recommend Mandrake since it has a very friendly
install process.  You will find that almost all linux distributions have
PHP, MySQL and Apache packages, so installing them would be trivial.

You can find free iso images for most linux distributions at
linuxiso.org.  I personally have used RedHat, Mandrake, SuSE -- and have
found my home with Gentoo (although I don't recommend Gentoo for new
comers).

For Unix -- there are the various *BSD distributions (such as FreeBSD).

Since your hardware is old, I would recommend a minimal install, no
Window managers, and you can even do without X.  I run a MySQL, PHP,
Apache2, Postgres, Tomcat, Zope, FTP, Samba server on a 800 Mhz Duron
box running Gentoo without any problems.  You can expect similar
performance from other Linux distributions.

Good luck, and welcome :)