After a realatively painless ordeal, I have my Linux server up and running. It is an Ubuntu 8.10 LAMP that was actually pretty easy. The whole thing pretty much sets itself up, even though the "15 minutes to a LAMP" guide was a bit of an optomistic title. Here is the guide I used.
After that, I knew that i would need SOME kind of GUI to manage it, but wanteed to avoid an actual "desktop" installed on teh server itself. 1.3Ghz and <1Gb of RAM will make yo uwant to stay "lean and mean".
A web based management tool called Webmin seems the way to go. After about an hour of following the install instructions for Windows XP and having it stillnot work, I realized that Webmin is supposed to be installed on the webserver...not on the PC you want to use to manage it.
DUH !. So I then followed the much simpler instructions for adding the necessary "packages" to my ubuntu server, using a slightly scarry but elgently simple command line.
Then it was just a matter of "surfing" to its IP address on a special port https://192.168.0.5:10000 and BAM! A login that wanted my ubuntu server user and pass.
Now I am faced with dozens of toools switches and features w/o a clue what to do with them. But hey, it works. At least I think it does. I've never seen a broken one so I can't say for sure.
No error mesages anyway.
Now I just ned to develop some actual content.
We'll see.