Hi all!

In a couple of days I will be setting up an old P3 to act as a server that will function as a WWW server, SMB server and possibly a FTP server as well. My P4, which now doubles as a desktop and a server, suffers from major slowdowns during access of my site. On my P4, before it was a desktop, I have tried ubuntu, SuSE, Fedora and Slackware as servers. I need some advice on which distro to use for the P3. I want to be able to set the computer up, and leave it alone, except for occasional reboots when its necessary. I need speed and stability, and realize those things only come from compiled source; and I'm deathly afraid to install Gentoo. From what I hear, it takes a very long time to install, and whenever I attempt to install from the LiveCD image, it complains about a USB port that it cant configure, and aborts the installation. So, I would like some friendly advice on which distros offer speed and stability on older PC's, and which of them you have had the most success on.

If you know what you're doing, install Arch. It's fast even with binary packages. The ABS (Arch Build System) should allow you to compile from source with whatever optimizations you want for even more speed. Not quite as complex as Gentoo but almost as robust. Plus, Gentoo sucks as a server distro...(Gentoo fanbois, don't hurt me, but it does in my experience. However, it's fast!)

Many programs for your tasks are available in the Arch repos. Apache, LightTTD, Samba, etc. I'd also strongly suggest setting up OpenSSH and/or Webmin for remote administration.

Debian will be fine - if you have used Ubuntu then you already know Debian. These days the first thing that I look for in a server distribution is support for online upgrades, which rules out Fedora, SUSE, and Slackware. The second is prompt and easy to apply software updates. Ubuntu Server and Debian are both pretty good. I haven't looked at Arch, so I don't know how it compares in these areas.

Arch starts up quite a bit less daemons and other programs by default but Debian can be configured to be similar. It would take a bit more system resources, but Debian would be okay. Not a noticeable impact on equipment life. Arch's advantage over Slackware is its excellent package management, but I've heard "slapt-get" is pretty nice.

Debian > Ubuntu. Ubuntu is a good desktop but as a server I can't stand it. It's like a less-efficient form of Debian and you won't notice much difference as far as ease of use on the command line level...it's just more cluttered.

I like Debian, I tried it briefly. But, I didn't know what I was doing and installed a lot more packages than I should have, and it took forever to boot (Appletalk servers take a long time to start, lol!). I haven't looked at Arch either. I like Fedora , I use it on my desktop, its pretty fast but I don't like that there is no support for the older versions once they reach a certain age. RPM based distros would've been my first choice for a server, However with Fedora's lack of updates and CentOS' ancient packages, I think I'll give Debian a try. I'll definitely have to check out Arch though. Thanks for all of your help!

It sounds like you picked up one of the desktop versions of Ubuntu, rather than the actual "Server Edition". Server Edition installs just a command-line system with no network services by default (not even SMTP, SSH, or NFS), so it's leaner than the default installation of Debian. Other than that, the current release of Ubuntu Server is just Debian with AppArmor, newer versions of software, and a commercial support provider, but the forthcoming release looks like it will have a few more features than standard Debian.

I admit that with Debian I use the minimal-system option and then add and remove stuff as necessary, so the defaults don't bother me too much.

I was referring to what happens when you select "Install a LAMP server." It adds more than just LAMP and some auto-configuration.