Which gui?
 

I have debian installed without a gui. At first I thought this would be fine, well I changed my mind. My friend set up apache, php, and mysql and I don't want to lose those settings because it would take me hours to set it up again instead of the 45mins it took him.

Back to the gui. I know/think there are several guis such as kde and gnome but which one is for me. I will be running a webserver and would also like to use it as a work station with open office, php programing, html/css/javascript editing, mysql work, aim, and using some internet browser. I don't want it to use to many resources and not to run a lot of modules. But I'm still not sure which gui to use.

EDIT: Do I have to use the debian gui? How do I install that and can I do it from http/ftp instead of a cd?

In this case, any desktop or window manager will do. If you are looking for light weight ones, try:

IceWM
Blackbox
Fluxbox
XFCE

They are pretty fast and nice to use and highly customizable. Indeed, you could try a big gun as Gnome and KDE. For Office, you know, we have OpenOffice. But if all you need is a word processor and a spreadsheet, you may consider Abiword and GNumeric...

Good luck!

The choice of gui is entirely up to you. KDE and Gnome are very full featured desktop environments and so heavily use system resources. Fluxbox, Blackbox, IceWM and others are lightweight desktop managers and so run with less resources.

KDE and Gnome are, imo, easier to use especially if you've just come from Windows. In theory, installing any of them shouldn't hurt your settings. It may be worth your while asking your friend to write you a how to on what he did for you - always wise to be prepared in case of problems :)

There's no such thing as 'Debian GUI'. All desktop environments/window managers (taht's probably what you call a GUI) are available in all distros.
When you know a name of the one you'd like to try, open a console and run (as root, so after using 'su' command):
where name is the name of the program you'd like to have.

From every GUI you can run every program. The difference is how it looks and how much resources it takes. KDE and GNOME are big, compilacated, very nice, but not very fast. There are many smaller like blackbox, fluxbox, windowmaker. Which one to choose is a matter of your preferences and how powerful machine you have.

Before installing any desktop manager or window managers, backup your system.

Mozilla, OpenOffice, and many other programs depends on the gtk package so you may want to install that first.

I have been using Window Maker and I found thats pretty easy to use since I had never used Linux before. Now that I am comfortable with it, I feel comfortable moving to another one. But thats just me. Good luck!
much love,
nikki