I'm a complete newbie to Linux and I need some pretty basic advice.

I current have a e-commerce site hosted by GoDaddy and I want to build a test environment.

The web site is ASP with a SQL*Server back end using ADO to access the data.

I want build a in house (i.e. only in my house and not on the internet) test system and ideally avoid paying for IIS, MS SQL etc. and Linux looks like an option.

I have some older Win98 PC's that are reasonable spec'd that should run

However on this forum and others I read some comments that ASP on a Linux server is basically a non starter and makes no sense.

So my question is it worth be building a Linux/Apache server or do I need to stick with Win2K3, IIS and just pay Bill Gates his license fees?

I didn't realize that Go Daddy had ASP support.

ASP is pretty much Windoze only. You would do well to get away from that. Go with PHP instead. Not only will that get you into the dominant environment on the internet (*nix), you will find that PHP is available for Windoze too.

Actually I think it's much more difficult to set up Apache on Windows - Not actually the setting-up, but it made my whole file structure as www-folder *shock*

And I never figured out how to change that.

The easiest way is probably setting it up with suse. I left the suse train a few months ago. - But on 10.1 you can configure a lamp server in yast by clicking ok a couple of times
I haven't tried it in Ubuntu yet.