[Wiltshire] Home server OS?

[Simon Iremonger (wiltslug)]

> I've only had experience with Ubuntu and Arch Linux (my main distro at
> the mo') -- what'd the best distro for a "home server" be? I'll just
> have it plugged into the router, so I have little requirements (no
> wifi/graphics needed), but as a CS student I may want somewhere to serve
> any ghastly PHP I write, or host other crap, perhaps backup, whatever
> slavery servers do. I was either thinking Debian stable or Ubuntu
> server. I only have 'til Thursday to get things up and running
> Any suggestions ideas/distro/server wise? I'd plan to firstly backup
> data and then nuke the drive using dban or similar.


Debian Stable works fine for that sort of thing...

My experience is, well, it depends on the particular version
  of particular software you are interested in ;-).

packages.debian.org  and  packages.ubuntu.com  can help you there...

Me and a friend use Debian 6.0 on a little machine which
  runs 6in4 ipv6-gateway, samba filesharing, web server,
  cups print server, WPA2 wireless access-bridge...
We use the 'console on serial port' mechanism for
  maintenance when wanting to see the bootup, or when
  fiddling with network settings etc.
Works rather well, actually ;-).


--Simon