I am very new to Linux but very technical. I have a spare box at home and I'd like to install the ideal Linux version/distribution in order to host a Nethack server. Common, easy and boring are my words to live by on this one.

I won't use the box for email or browsing or anything like that... just to host Nethack. I have a small amount of information from the Nethack README.linux file and here is what may be relevant:

The official Linux binary has support for tty and X11 windowing systems, but not Qt. This means you will need to have X11 libraries installed on your system to run this binary, even in its tty flavor.

The usual default for NetHack is setuid games, but this causes problems with accessing .nethackrc on distributions with
restrictive default security on home directories and users who don't know the tradeoffs of various permission settings.

Any thoughts or help would be very much appreciated as I've got a whole weekend of time to get this going.

Thank you very much!

what have you tried so far?
i don't see why it shouldn't be possible with debian stable + LAMP.
search the debian wiki on how to install a LAMP stack.

ondoho thank you very much for your reply. At the time of my post I hadn't tried anything because I didn't know what to try. I spent yesterday afternoon and evening reading and comparing. Got it down to Debian, Ubuntu Server or CentOS. I couldn't find any major difference between dpkg and rpm so that wasn't a decider. I was interested in Debian as I just wanted a server but everything I read said it was not for Linux newbies.

I downloaded, burned and installed Ubuntu Server last night but I wasn't able to get the networking going via command line. After additional reading it seems that the Server and Desktop builds the same save the graphical interface. I've downloaded the Desktop image which was too big for my CDs so I'm going to try a boot off this flash drive in a bit and see how it goes.

I'm sure that's more than you needed to know but I am making progress. Thank you again for the reply.

sorry to hear that.
i installed debian stable and chose "web server" in tasksel, didn't take longer than a normal netinstall (= no gui).
just had to start apache service, and that was that. it's all there in the wiki.
https://wiki.debian.org/LaMp
https://wiki.debian.org/Apache