Hi
I'm a complete novice as far as Linux goes,but I have been using computers since the 1980's so I'm familar with things like comand line interface etc.
I am trying to set up a server at home rather than using a hosting service. Being retired on disability I have more time than money.I want to use my old computer that I kept when I upgraded.
It is a Median with a 2.6 P4 processor and a 75 GB hard drive. It has 1GB of 2700 ram.
I plan on using the Ubuntu server OS. with Apache,SQL and PHP.
My question is. Is this computer sufficent?
I have several larger HD's if needed,but the ram is maxed out on the MB.Is the on board video sufficent or does it need a video card?It has a wireless internet card and I have a router on a 12MPS internet connection. I can upgrade to 18MPS if needed.

David

Welcome, David!

If you are running Ubuntu Server then the video card is pretty much irrelevant as you won't have a local GUI.

75GB is plenty for the OS and application stack - whether it's enough for your needs depends more on what kind of data you want to store. And 1GB of RAM is fine too, again assuming you are not going to load a GUI / Desktop Environment and you are not going to serve hundreds of simultaneous users (just a home server, I assume).

We can't even get 12Mb/s internet connections here ...

If you have more detailed questions the best thing will probably be to start a new thread in the "Newbies" forum

Joe

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Thanks Joe

This will be mainly a home server,but will host my Family web page and a small home business.I guess I was confused about the difference between Server and Desktop. I may end up using Desktop on another computer after I get used to Server.
I get my internet through my Cable company. 12MPS is the slowest they have,with 18MPS as a step up. They have 24MPS if you want to change over to their bussiness package.Here in the USA we get spoiled and don't always realize how lucky we are in some things.

David

Server and desktop are in the basic terms the same. The sever is more useful for what you want to do if you know how to perform all the tasks either by command line or from a remote management.

You could do all of it from the desktop too if you want.

I'd think that for simple pages, almost a dial up would work. You don't need a lot to host a page unless you have way too big of images or other time consuming stuff.

Also, you may wish to consider the energy cost to run and cool this. A 24/7 of 180 watts may be an issue. A cheap atom/amd solution may work too.

If you leave another more powerful system on all the time you can also consider using virtual machine images. There are many pre-made that may suit your needs.

hderhut,
You might want to put a cheap Gig Ethernet NIC in your PC and connect it directly to your router. My own wireless is sometimes flaky and I wouldn't use it to serve content to Internet users. Even better would be two Gig NICs that you could team with the Linux bonding driver, but you'd need a switch that understands LACP to do that.
Where will you be developing your web content, and how will you get it into place on the web server? Since the PC needs to use all its resources to the LAMP setup, you won't want to run X and a heavy desktop environment. So the computer with office applications, a web browser, etc., would probably become your development station. Then you could use Filezilla or something like that to upload content to the web server.
Good luck.

Be sure that you can easily use port 80 on that company.

I would not use a gigabit card, it won't help anything as far as your network speed over isp. Unless you just happen to have one for some reason. I would agree that wireless is a poor choice on this machine for sure. Too much cpu time working to use it. A 100base card should do fine but try the one you have first maybe.

There are some distro's that run off a cd and usb for home server tasks.

Thanks for all the sugestions. I was going to use the wireless because I already use it to service my Desktop and my Home Intertainment Center and my NAS Drive. I will hard wire the server. I have a couple extra cards. I plan on using my Desktop for developement. My desktop runs 24/7 because of my Magic Jack phone . If I can figure a way to transfer that to the server I will. That way I'll only have one computer on 24/7.