Newb-Friendly Linux Flavor For LAMP Server? 382
First time accepted submitter bhcompy writes "I need to setup a system to serve 2500 users and I've been looking at a LAMP setup. This is not commercial, more of a personal side project for some friends. I've no experience configuring or administering a Linux server having worked with MS and PICK based solutions my whole life, so I'm looking for something that will be relatively straightforward to implement and not a chore to manage and preferably not completely CLI. I will be serving a forum(phpBB 3 suits my needs and seems adequate) and a variety of PHP driven content with a MySQL backend. Requirements are PHP 5.3.0+ and MySQL 5+. Suggestions?"
Re:Easy. (Score:4, Interesting)
I agree with the suggestion to use Ubuntu, especially due to the massive amount of old forum posts online that will answer most questions. However, installing ubuntu-desktop will certainly give you a GUI, but that GUI won't particularly help you to administer your LAMP stack.
I find it very useful to have a GUI when administering an Ubuntu system. It's great to have a couple CLI windows open in which commands can be typed. I can 'tail' a log file while I type commands in another terminal window. A web browser can be used to check the results of commands that will affect the outward facing parts of the system.
When you get to using the on line support forums to help deal with issues, it's great to be able to copy a command from the web browser into a term window. I do have CLI only Ubuntu installations but I administer by SSHing into the box and administering it from the GUI on another PC.
And WRT your suggestion to keep a cheat sheet of common commands, I do that as well. I keep them in a text file so I can cut and paste them into a terminal window.
Of course this can all be done using something like PuTTY from a Windows PC but is slightly more convenient on the system console using X copy/paste. (Highlight text and paste with or middle mouse button.)