I am setting up a web server at home...

I was trying to decide between Ubuntu Server 7.10 and Fedora 8 for a while but I finally went the Fedora 8 route because I was told more businesses use it than Ubuntu due to it being part of Red Hat enterprises....I hope I made the right choice...

I have Fedora 8 up and running and need to put LAMP and SAMBA on it so I can develope on my ......sigh.........Windows machine.

I am a noob when it comes to installing software in Linux...
How should I go about getting this server together?

I saw on the GUI there is add/remove software, wasn't sure if I could pull it off from there or need to do everything in the terminal.

Do the LAMP components need downloaded or are they already a part of Fedora 8 setup? (on the disk) I hope to use the newest versions of everything, PHP 5 etc...

Any point in the right direction is greatly appreciated!
Thanks in advance Linux community!

Maybe miles brennan's homeserver howto might be of use; it's written for FC5. I however have used parts of it to setup my Slackware servers.

I dont use FC or Ubuntu server, so can not further advise.

There is nothing against samba, but why do you need it to develop on a windows box?

I was under the impression that it was required for windows to communicate with Linux... So I can just browse the folders on the Linux Machine from My Windows machine like a shared drive...

Do I have that right or am I the ultimate noob?

:-(

Samba is not the only way to communicate between windows and linux. Telnet (not secure), SSH (secure), FTP (can be made secure) and NFS (not sure about security) are some of the alternatives.

Samba is however the most common way to share files between linux and windows; but that has nothing to do with web servers.

I develop and maintain some intranet sites at work (Slackware servers) and access the servers from my windows desktop using only SSH and FTP (the latter over SSL).