A long story short...I had a Mandrake Linux 9.0 box setup to run my webserver that was setup by my uncle. Well he moved and I went to an online server.

I would like to get back my domain on my own linux box using the user friendly up to date Mandrake (or Mandiva I think its called now). Does anyone have a set of instructions on how to do this?

What is your experience with linux? Do you have any experience running a webserver? On linux? Depending on your experience, you may need to get a few books if you and do some googling.

This was posted in another thread and there are some HOWTO articles on web servers here:

http://www.linux-tutorial.info/

I'm not sure Mandriva One is the best choice, either. It seems to be a desktop distribution and not a server. Have you looked at SuSE or Fedora? Installing either of these or any number of others with Apache would be a good place to start.

Installing a webserver on suse is ridiculously easy - but be shure you read a suse-specific howto (that goes for every distro). But it's not much harder on ubuntu.

If you consider Mandriva a desktop distribution, then you should consider Fedora, Ubuntu, SuSE and all alike too. They're aimed at desktop use. Any one of them can however be turned into a webserver, but that means (if you ask me) removing a lot of stuff and configuring default settings towards a webserver. I wouldn't choose SuSE nor Fedora right out of the box for a webserver, it's so much work to get those big distributions stripped off the unneeded software and made efficient for server use. But then again, if it's your personal server, you think you can manage it and are not worried about security and efficiency issues (you should be), go ahead; I think it's good to learn to do the job with an enough-easy-to-use distribution of Linux than spending countelss hours hardening some really rude distribution and once it's ready, notice that you're actually not able to do all the stuff you wanted because it seems so difficult. Better start off with easier methods because they're available anyway SuSE wouldn't be my pick. Maybe Ubuntu's 6.06 LTS Server 'edition' was a good start; it offers LAMP if you want, and a support longer than Fedora's or SuSE's for exmaple (if I'm not mistaken). And if you, after some time, feel it's not your thing, you can always switch over.

Suse is not insecure. You can choose if you want a desktop system or a server system during the installation. Suse is actually a very popular server system - at least in europe.
And even if you choose the desktop installation... you don't really need all that hardcore efficiency. It doesn't sound like he's going to set up a commercial blade server.

If you don't have much background in Mandriva anyway, I would recommend you try Ubuntu. They have a huge userbase, and alot of helpful tutorials on their wiki page and in their user forum. That should get you started pretty quick.