Time to start Linuxing..some questions?

Background.

I used to run many unix systems including Lunix :-), years ago, mainly servers. Then I sold that company, and gave up having much to do with computers, apart from my aging Wn98 box which does all I *mainly* need..

Except I DO miss the ability to fiddle cleanly and easily, have things like cron and tar to back the systems up, a C compiler, a MySQL layer...
Last distro I used was Redhat - 6 or 7 I think. No X-windows used. Server only/command line/Telnet blah blah blah.

Now a friend has gifted me MOST of a PC - needs some form of writable archive (DVD?) and a hard drive. Probably 110GByte or whatever is cheap these days. Will source from friendly local PC man.

Now I need a distro. What I don;t want is one with a humongously 'it looks and feels just like Windows' window manager on it.

I assume that the first stage is to boot something from CD that will get me on the net to download the rest..advice on how to bootstrap a raw installation would be much appreciated.

The distro I would prefer would be rock solid, with full support for an average to poor graphics card, the usual sound bollocks, and so on..

The intention is to build this machine as a stable platform for SAMBA, and appletalk (atalk) to act as a files server for the Win98 and MACOS 9 machines..printing is already networked here..and also to investigate use of VMWARE for some PC windows apps, and Star office(?) for Excel word compatibility, with a view to getting a laptop in 2007 and running most of what I want under Linux with more portability than at present. Also firefox/thunderbird etc.

What I DON'T want is 'plug and play we do everything for you just like windows'...I'd rather edit config files by hand with vi thank you. At least I know if it screws up where to look.

Apache and MySQL will go on there later. Want to experiment with web forms on a database..

So a rock solid distro, with a slender graphics environment..and basic outline of how to get raw hardware into a networked stated?

Pretty please?
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Relevant Pages

  • Re: Time to start Linuxing..some questions?
    ... Server only/command line/Telnet blah ... Now I need a distro. ... here..and also to investigate use of VMWARE for some PC windows ... WE only ever used it to write scripts in, and in general I pretty much outlawed it because either the problem really needed C for any kind of speed, or it COULD be written in shell, and since shell was what the systems used, shell is what you wrote in please. ...
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  • Re: Does Microsoft lie about the Linux features?
    ... about 5 hotfixes a week from my distro makers to fix silly things like my ... protect against buffer overflows) problems in Windows 2003 Server and .NET. ... > this was stupid because DOS couldn't read NTFS. ...
    (comp.os.linux.networking)
  • Re: Does Microsoft lie about the Linux features?
    ... about 5 hotfixes a week from my distro makers to fix silly things like my ... protect against buffer overflows) problems in Windows 2003 Server and .NET. ... > this was stupid because DOS couldn't read NTFS. ...
    (comp.os.linux.misc)
  • Re: Does Microsoft lie about the Linux features?
    ... about 5 hotfixes a week from my distro makers to fix silly things like my ... protect against buffer overflows) problems in Windows 2003 Server and .NET. ... > this was stupid because DOS couldn't read NTFS. ...
    (comp.os.linux.hardware)
  • Re: Time to start Linuxing..some questions?
    ... I used to run many unix systems including Lunix :-), years ago, mainly ... Last distro I used was Redhat - 6 or 7 I think. ... Server only/command line/Telnet blah blah blah. ... terminal (dual floppy) with a webserver and change on one 1.44MB floppy, ...
    (comp.os.linux.misc)