To be exact. Be sure you make your recovery media for Windows 7 first and be sure you know what a hidden partition might be or the 100mb windows extra partition.

The most safe way is to use virtualbox or vmplayer. Unless you have a complete test box use the virtual machine.

Pretty much any major distro will do just fine for the small set of standard server applications that you want to deploy. John VVs advice about Fedora and other 'beta' level distros would be well heeded. Definitely do a few dry runs, until you get the details sorted out. Plan on tossing out a bit of work you've done when you find that you fouled something up, and just restart until things start to become second nature as you set up all the pieces. Spend more time doing and less time fretting about which distro.

--- rod.

So, I did one install to test how it looks like and the second install to work on!
Now, I want to install jdk-7u9 and when I type sudo apt-get install python-software-properties it can't find the repository!? How can I install it?
Also, how can I navigate to my external hard drive from the command line? I downloaded and copied the file to my drive on another computer but don't know how to access that file! ((
Thank you for your help!

+1 to the idea of using a virtual machine running on Windows 7 for this exercise.

VirtualBox is the easiest virtualising software to use. It has an excellent User Guide but the GUI is so intuitive you will probably never use it!

The reasons for favouring a virtual machine are:

• Fast installation from a .iso file on the host rather than from DVD.
• Ease of copy and paste from the guest into documentation (project log, sysdmin instructions etc.) on the host. Requires the VirtualBox extension pack to be installed on the host -- pretty much essential for ease of use anyway.
• Ease of backing up the guest; just copy its virtual HDD file on the host while the guest is not running.
• Ease of restoring the guest; just restore the previous virtual HDD file on the host while the guest is not running.

Speed of installation and ease of backup and restore are especially important when the sysdmin is not highly experienced at installing the specific OS and layered software and anyway the software is prototype.

EDIT:

+1 also to the idea of using a stable distro rather than Ubuntu.

Regards choice of distro, if you will need to ask questions of the online support community (you almost certainly will) then check out the online support community for each distro you are considering. Are useful answers given and promptly? Do you understand the answers (does the community speak your language)? Would you feel comfortable participating in that community?

Manual if you want to dual boot with Windows-

That's why I told you to install GUI, just for occasional use. It will probably display some notification when you plug in your drive. You would easily check/add repositories, also. And you can just run an browser and search the internet, too. Then exit GUI, and you have your server without extra load.
Every this tasks can be done from CLI, but you need to find out how.

Cheers,