Okay well let me start from the beginning.

My school just offered me the chance to be server administrator of the school server (that I am going to make from scratch) and I accepted because I love computers and would lvoe hte experience. The trouble is I have never had a server of my own before.

Heres what I am asking. Where is the best place for someone to learn about server hosting?

I am reasonably familiar with linux and have been suing it for a while now. I used mandrake first then moved to slack and tried to install gentoo but felt it was a bit much for me for the time being.

Since Im sure many of you have servers of your own I thought this would be the best place to ask.

My school basically has given me a server box. 2.8Ghz and 512MB ram. Its a good setup. I have access to it and basically I can install anything I want on it, but your suggestions and advice will help me decide on what exactly to use.

Basically the server is for the school website and school project websites. Obviously apache and php and mysql. All the basics, nothing too complex.

What distribution do you guys suggest?
Where can i read more about server administration?
What should I install for hte server?
What should I read to make this easier for myself?
Any links that would help me?

I have more questions but Ill wait to see if I get any replies. Thank you in advance.

I cant tell you links for what to read, although There are good tutorials about the workings of apache.

What you are doing is pretty simple.
APache(httpd), mod_perl,mod_php, and some other simple modules.

here,
http://httpd.apache.org/docs/misc/tutorials.html

That should help you with Apache.

Thats sort of all I want. Trouble with a lot of Distros is that they are installed with enormous amounts of stuff and I dont know exactly what half of it is..

I want the system with some sort of graphical interface such as KDE and apache, mysql, php, and whatever else I need to run a web server

I'd vote against the GUI for a webserver. Its only going to take away resources and really isn't needed to tell you the truth. Most of the stuff you will deal with in setting up apache for a webserver is done by the command line only. The GUI would just be a waste of space and resources. And if this is a server others from the University will be using, you'll get better performance without KDE or the like.

You just need to chose what you want installed. Don't do a full install.

Also, KDE would be overkill on a server. I personally don't have any sort of GUI installed on any of my Linux servers, but if I did, I would use something light like FluxBox.

The thing is I want to have GUI access to start it with.. I mean just so i can get the feel of things a bit. Once I get everything the way I want I will remove whatever GUI I am using and use command line. But I mean at the moment chosing the system setup is more important to me than a gui..

Well since Im not an expert I dont know exactly what I want installed and what i dont...

Also I cant be the first person to start learning about how ot run a server.. How did everyone learn?

I can guarantee you that they didn't learn by just jumping in an administrating a school server from scratch. There is a learning curve to this after all.

On offense, but if you don't know what packages to install for server system, you are going to have a hell of a time trying to set it up and administrate it successfully.