My Dad gave me his old laptop. I wanted to start a LAMP Server. I do not know which distrobution to use: Debian, Gentoo, Slackware, CentOS, etc.? Any help would be appreciated.

You can use any of the distributions that you have listed, but if you want to get an instant solution, try a LiveCD with pre-configured LAMP software to get you going right away. The idea is that you boot your computer with the LiveCD, and you have an instant LAMP server. These are great for learning.

SLAMPP LiveCD, based on Slackware (SLAX)
LiveLAMP
LAMPPIX

You might also look into XAMPP, an "an easy to install Apache distribution containing MySQL, PHP and Perl" which comes pre-packaged for Linux, Windows, OSX and Solaris. You use XAMPP as an alternative to your distro's packages. I haven't used this, so I don't know if this is any good or not, but it might be handy for learning purposes.

anyone got any links to some good LAMP howtos/tutorials??

a slackware-ish one would be really nice...

For SuSE, check out this informative tutorial from Novell Coolsolutions

Additionally, I've found that Bruce Timberlake's LAMP Howto to be helpful. It's focussed on Redhat, but applicable to other distros. Happy reading

thanks man...

that lamphowto.com site looks like it's just what i was looking for!!!

Right on. I'm no LAMP expert but at least for my own modest purposes, both those sites were very helpful, and would recommend them as useful reference materials