Hi everyone,

First of all, I just want to say web sites like these are great! I would much rather run my computer off advice from "regular" people rather than just biting off whatever the corporate lines want me to chew...

Having said that, I would like to set up a server in my home to run apache, a game server for counterstrike once in a while, and a fileserver for my home network. I have already installed and played with Suse, Kubuntu, and Fedora, and they are all great but my only complaint is that they either just want to give me the program and let me configure it, or they want to configure everything for me and then make me go into each little thing and play with it. (Yes yes I know this is a very noob-ish complaint .)

What I would like is a distro with an intuitive installation interface that is smart enough to know what to ask me to get these features up and running. The alternative is a distro that is as bare bones as possible and wont install about a million little daemons that it thinks I need but that I have no clue waht they do... I'd rather just get a basic, insecure server set up and running and then add features myself...

I've heard good things about slackware for learning linux so I'm thinking of trying that now. I will probably switch back over to one of the more "complex" distros once I have gotten my feet wet but for now, I just want something simple. Sorry this has been so long but any advice would be great! Thanks!

JW

This may be worth a read to see how you might do it with Debian:
http://www.howtoforge.com/perfect_setup_debian_sarge

Running a secure server is no easy task. It takes knowledge and maintenance. No such thing really as a newbie server, or at least not a secure one.

Thats actually one of the most confusing posts I've ever seen in my life. Any of those distros you mentioned are fine for creating a file server. In Suse, it takes just a few clicks to get apache running.

I guess all I was really trying to say is that I want something that won't force me to install a thousand packages that I will never need nor know what they do. I like to be aware of everything going on in my computer, which is why I want something simple that works well to learn on. I know there is no such thing as a noob server but I would like to just get the server running without being asked if i want this and that daemon running. Maybe I just need to play with it more but I wanted to get some advice first.

I've heard good things about Slackware for noobs who want to really learn linux. Any thoughts?

JW

Hi and welcome to LQ

Well slackware is stable and at some points easy to use, but I wont recommend it for starters.

Here is what i recommend:

1: SuSe 10 eval.

2: Mandriva 2006 free

3: Fedora core 4

Those three are definately good for a start

Have fun.

Thanks for the tips. I have tried SUSE and FC4 and they were both very attractive OSs but I have just installed Kubuntu 5.10 and it seems like it could very well be the lightweight system that I've been looking for! Unlike SUSE and FC4 it didnt offer to install a bunch of things that I dont need but it was very intuitive in its installation. Cheers for Kubuntu!

JW

Well, there's lots of easy distros out there, like PCLinuxOS and SuSE, but if you want to have a relatively simple setup i'd go for either Slackware (if you're really keen on learning a lot and running into trouble), Debian Sarge (if you want a rock stable server with a good package manager) or Ubuntu 5.10 servber install (has almost the same things as Debian, but it's more up-to-date. Maybe a little less stable)

Kind Regards Bjerrk

Less stable eh? I'll keep that in mind if I do run into any trouble as this is a somewhat older computer. Thanks.

JW

Stability in this context doesn't mean hardware stability, it means stability in the sense of how well all of the programs and services work together. Debian stable (currently Sarge) is very stable because it uses versions of software that have been proven stable. The disadvantage is that these versions are older (it takes time to work out all the bugs). (K)Ubuntu uses newer packages that may still have bugs or even dependency problems, although it is probably... mostly... okay.

Good deal, thanks

Slackware is a good 3rd distribution, meaning you have to have tried using a Linux distibution and become familiar with how things are done, then tried another and discovered how different distros do some things differently, while other things are similar and distribution-independent.
When you are at a level when you want to learn deeper, Slackware and Gentoo would be the choices to go with.
For a first effort, I would suggest PCLinuxOS.