Complete newbie needs help making decission
 

Hi People,

Im completely new to linux onyl breifly used it on a laptop i bought.

I want to install a server on a Intel P4 3.00Ghz SKT-478 800FSB with 4gb of ram and 2 x 250gb Raid 0 & 2 x 250GB Raid 0 hard drives.

The main use of the server will be to run PHPBB3.04 with board3 portal.
So needs to do PHP, Mysql, SQL, cpanel or plesk would be nice....generally any tool that would make managing it remotely easy so open to suggestions on that, phpmyadmin.

The server once up with that may also be used as a teamspeak or ventrillo server and maybe even a game server occassionally.

I would like it to be easy to install if possible, although im not adverse to going through a painstaking install if it is of benefit.

Im hearing that debian or cento's would be a good choice but it seems like you guys are the people to ask :)

Many thanks in advance

Ross

Ok, first are you using an onboard Raid chip to get your Raid0? If so this (most probably) is not true hardware raid but rather it is Fake Raid(just google it). This will definitely not perform as well as true hardware raid(cards start at about $300). Depending on the chipset Linux may or may not be able to use the Fake raid, many (most?) would probably suggest you use Linux's own internal software raid instead of fake raid.

2nd issue, in order to use the full 4gb of ram you will need to use a 64bit distro. Any 32bit distro(or OS for that matter) will require using a hack (usually PAE) in order to access all the memory(roughly anything over 3gb). Again depending on chipset any 64bit cpu should be fine, EXCEPT some Intel based motherboards cheated and used a 32bit memory controller instead of a 64bit(which limits you to using 32bit OS2).

Almost any distro should be able to do what you are asking (in general). You will have to balance two things; stability vs latest/greatest. The latest and greatest (Fedora being one) can be nice as all the newest widgets are there, but you are faced with a short support life(13months for Fedora) and things can(and often do) break with updates. For a server I would go for stability. Centos has a five year support life and is very stable, but the packages on it are going to be older (more thoroughly tested) than what you will generally see on Fedora.

Ok thats fine and i can upgrade the hardware as i have another old machine here with a E6700 which will support 64bit and larger memory allocation. I also have loads of new 3ware raid contorllers around so thats not a problem either.

Something i forgot to ask is i would also want to use the server as a file storage box and an ftp server wold that affect my choice or are these in every distro?

Virtually every distro will be able to do those as well.

Edit: For running what you are asking about you should not need all that much ram, so I would not let that be a limitation.

Thanks for the advice i will go and get centos now, also i noticed there is 5.2 and a 4.7 server cd would i want the server one or is 5.2 also server but just not named as such?

Yeah, you can run a sever from any version. Go with the most current (5.2) it will have the best hardware support. When an update is released (X.y to X.y+1) you can just yum update to it. However when you go from x.y to (x+1).y (five years from now) I would suggest doing a clean install.

brilliant thanks for the advice lazlow its much appreciated