I am wondering if there is such a thing as a linux server, for dummies? Dummy, being someone who is fluent in OS/2 and Windows networks and servers, and who has installed dozens of linux distros over the years, but never really became an guru. Mostly just dabbled with them, and only got "under the hood" when necessary.

A friend works for a three man company that has no network support. Their FreeBSD server boot drive has failed, although I believe their RAID is still intact. I want to offer to help by either reinstalling FreeBSD, or going with another flavor, but only if I can muddle through it without a major crash course in linux command line setups.....

Is there such a thing as a server, that can be configured mostly from the GUI?

Given that small amount of info, any recommendations? (besides abandon ship <g>)

Thanks a lot.

John

well not in terms of a distribution in itself, but you can run interfaces like cpanel on just about any distro you are comfortable with. it's more designed for hosting implementations, but will probably do you fine. ther's also the older webmin system too.

The Gentoo installation walks you through the process very clearly - use their handbook from Gentoo.org.

Alternatively, I found the book "Setting Up LAMP" by Rosebrock & Filson (Sybex) very easy and totally focussed on getting a LAMP server up and running from scratch. They suggest Fedora Core but it was trivial to translate the instructions to Gentoo.

relatively speaking installing gentoo is *HARD*. relativey to fedora, mepis etc... if there' one distro i wasn't about to suggest it'd be gentoo.

It's a fair point.

On the other hand I think the transparency of Gentoo, while it can be frightening, is very educational. I understand the way Linux fits together much better now that I have built a couple of Gentoo installations.

I suppose it depends on the purpose and time you have available - I have a spare machine to play with and I need to understand this stuff properly in order to teach it at school.

oh totally, i ran gentoo for about three years with a huge amount of success, and had no problems reading the instructions, but that was largely because i could put them into a context, i knew why i was typing what i was...