[paulareno]

Hey everyone, im new here and in need of professional help.

I have a computer running xp running easyphp with 1ghz 256mb ram 3gb hdd, so as you can imagine xp is chewing it to pieaces (poor hardware lol) anyway i would love to be running some form of linux as my web server, i'v had my good and bad with linux based os's but it has always come out on top over microsoft. due to speed, reliabilty and just a great feel to it. so i would like a linux free os that would run some form of a web server (preferably easyphp if possible) umm i want to have a good firewall (somthing like sygate firewall would be great). and of course i'm a noob so please be nice. lol

So yeah thats basicly what i need.

Thanks for reading, any suggestions would be excellent.

[daark.child]

CentOS and Debian make very good server operating systems. CentOS is based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux, so you get the stability of an enterprise class operating system. Same for Debian, it undergoes a lot of testing to make sure that its stable for server and everyday use.

[paulareno]

I've never heard on Centos but after doing a little reading it sounds not to bad, what would you suggest for a web server like lamp or something?

edit: looking at centos it seems to be a fairly large os why is this?

[daark.child]

What do you mean by large? Are you referring to the installation media because if so, CentOS is way smaller than Debian which is 2 dvd discs or 21 cds. With any distro, you can install only the packages you need, so size of the installation media does not matter. If you do not want to download the entire cd/dvd sets, you can do a network install using the CentOS rescue cd or the Debian netinstall cd. These install a minimal OS and everything else you choose is dowloaded from the web.

Both CentOS and Debian are used for LAMP servers and both are very popular in the web hosting sector.

[ozar]

Welcome to the forums!

If you really want to stay small without much effort, go with a Debian Netinstall. Doing that, you only install the minimal base system and then you install only what you want/need on top of it, by ftp.

Also, check this poll for favorite server distro.

Let us know how it goes.

[anomie]

I'd also add that CentOS (as of 5.1, maybe sooner) offers a netinstall cd, which is ~7.3MB.

[paulareno]

Hey everyone thank you heaps for all your help.

the netinstall cd of centos sounds good to me. where can i find this netinstall cd ?

Thanks, Paul

[ozar]

You can find it in these mirrors:

http://isoredirect.centos.org/centos/5/isos/i386/

...the name of the file you want is:

CentOS-5.1-i386-netinstall.iso

[paulareno]

thankyou for the link, this way i don't have to download everything.

Is there a list of packages i can install or anything like that?

[ozar]

I've never installed CentOS but it might ask you during the installation which packages or packages groups you want to install. At least Red Hat did that a number of years back.