Specific requirements

[freesome]

Hi,

I have a machine that used to be OK until its motherbord blew up. I quickly swapped in an old pentium 166 board I had lying around. The machine is now quite slow, but serves fine as a fileserver.

However the linux on the machine is quite a bloated desktop distro, and I really want to start again.

I need only SMB, APACHE PHP and MYSQL, and SSH. The machine is a little too slow to compile its own kernal, so that rules out source based dists. So basicaly Im after a fairly simple to install (as I have 2 huge data partitions I wish to keep intact), console based (I dont even usally have a monitor connected. And good stable LAMP.

I was thinking of Debian, but I hear rumours that PHP/MYSQL/APACHE is problematic from a standard install, and you have to use unstable??

Thanks for your help...

Pete

[ph34r]

Debian will work fine, and unstable doesn't exist (yet) - they just did a stable release Sarge.

Using apt-get you can get all setup for the services you want in just about no time at all.

[freesome]

Ok, thanks sounds good. Infact I found a little article http://www.madcarters.com/content/view/26/1/ and the whole process sounds painless. Im sure I remeber having some issues last year, with the previous debian release, when installing PHP or maybe PEAR, as there was some packages I had to get from another repository, and my worry there was unease about updateing for security updates and so on.

As to installing - really I just want to format my boot and root partitions and keep all my user data partitions intact, unfortunatly I dont have anyway to back up this data before hand - so is anyone aware of any potential gotchas before I take the plunge...?

[machiner]

Hey freesome --

I found this string in my logs and I'm wondering how it worked out for you.

I hope well. If you need help email me through my site.

Thanks for mentioning my site.

happy computing

--machiner
madcarters, a Debian Rag

[Hayl]

pick any one that you like the package management suite for and their init scripts. every distro can all run the same software.