Wow. Sorry bout the rough life. We don't usually have stories like this on LQ, but it certainly reminds a person that we aren't just dealing with screen names as much as people with whole different lives on the other end.

BTW, I didn't get to it, but welcome to LQ! Hopefully this "place" is beneficial to you.

Side note...given LQ has around 300,000 people as members, and the world population is predominately female, it shouldn't be surprising to have at least a few thousand women on this forum.

I second that; sounds like you've had a tough time. Of course there are a lot of girls in IT, but it tends to be statistically a significant excess of males, in the tech area eg Prog/sysadmin/Net Admin area.
Just my exp (23 yrs).

Anyway, back to business, you do need to really consider what you want to do with this system, that will dictate what to get.
Eg if you favour a particular app for hosting that uses say MySQL and PHP, you'll have to load those anyway.
The generic LAMPPP (Linux/Apache/MySQL/Perl/PHP/Python) is certainly very popular and used by some large company's eg Amazon, Google, Yahoo etc.

Oh, and welcome to LQ btw

Google and Yahoo! use FreeBSD...

Actually I was under the impression that they (prob) use both (most big companies use multiple OSes etc), but to be honest I don't bother to keep up with that stuff, as long as they work

answering the original question:

I don't like Suse as a desktop system, but I always had suse servers for my web stuff, and never had any problems.

If I had to start clean it would be either suse or redhat. More likely suse, because I already set up a lamp server on it, and it couldn't be much easier.
I don't know how much setup work you have to do on Debian. On the desktop I'm definitely leaning towards the Debian side of things. On the server I don't need anywhere near as many packages, and I don't need a very flexible OS.

I run my server on Gentoo (a home proxy/email server). It gives you everything you need, and not a byte more.

Oh, by the way. Welcome to LQ.

OSCommerce is a fine choice.

There are a million other opensource shopping carts. You can check sourceforge.net.

Just get your server set up with LAMP. Are you going to have command line access to your server? Try to get that, and then get all your /var/www/html directories owned by your username; also, get a root password for mysql.

also, have the owner of /etc/php.ini and /etc/my.cnf changed to your username. you'll probably want to change those sometimes.

and get permission for your user to start, stop and restart mysqld and httpd.

you also better have perl on it...

that, sourceforge.net, and a few books/websites on php/mysql should be enough to do just about anything you could ever imagine.