First off let me say that I use Windows 99% of the time. Please don't shoot me I've been wanting to get familar with Linux so I just decided to go ahead and do it.

I have just installed Mepis on a computer that has the following: 933 Mhz, 128 MB and 20 GB hard drive. How will this work as a webserver? It is just going to be for a personal webpage and a few churches. Do I need to add more memory?

Does Mepis have a tool like "remote desktop" in windows? I know you can telnet into Linux, but is there a GUI option for this?

Also do I need to log in as under the root account or the account I created to do all of the web server stuff? Or does it even matter?


Thank you very much

Depending on the amount of traffic, 128MB should be OK. Make sure you have a good sized swap partition just in case.

For remote desktop, look into Freenx.

You can create user permissions so that you don't need to log in as root to change webserver stuff.

What is a good sized swap partition? And how can I check it? And can it be changed?

I just did the auto install, so I don't know how big it is.

Make the swap partition 1GB to ensure you have enough swap in case your sites get hammered.

99.9% chance you'll never need that much swap space but just in case, ya know?

if you chose a default partition layout, your swap should be double the size of your RAM.

The computer you describe will be more than adequate for a web server, if the intended audience is as you describe. I'm sensing that this will be running on a home DSL network or something of that ilk, and the computer will easily handle anything that that network capacity can throw at it. Web serving isn't really a big power hog, like many people make it out to be, unless there is some serious backend database or other compute-intensive element to it.

The GUI on most Linux's is hosted on an X server. Any computer that has an X server (X servers are avaialble for Windows) should be able to support GUI applications, including a desktop, remotely. GUI applications might like a bit more RAM than 128 MB. I strongly suggest NOT using telnet. Use ssh instead. Telnet, rlogin, ftp and their kin are not sufficiently secure for today's world. Please disable those daemons on the server, if it is attached to a publicly accessible network.

You should create a group that contains the user ID that the web server runs as, and include the maintenance account that you will use for doing 'all of the web server stuff' in it. Make the files' group-owner that group.

--- rod.

Hi

Like yourself, I've only recently started playing with Linux as a server, heres some advice from a fellow newb

As far as a home webserver goes, take a look at XAMPP, basically it sets up Apache/MySql/PHP etc all in one go. I managed to learn the basics of the linux terminal and set up a webserver at home over a weekend.

All the best

J