I ended up settling on Ubuntu for my web server. I went back to the Warty 4.10 which is working great for this purpose so far. I had some problems getting Apache, MySQL, and PHP4 installed and communicating with each other.
I opened Synaptic, and searched for Apache and didn’t find a whole lot. Searched for MySQL and only found a few things. Then “PHP4-MySQL” to give PHP4 access to MySQL and couldn’t find it.
Then it sparked. I didn’t check the boxes to open up the “universe” repositories. Once I did that, it added like 12,000 additional packages.
I found everything I needed and got it all installed and migrated within 2 hours. Not bad for a guy who has only seriously been setting up linux servers for a week. I had experience way back in the mid 90’s with early RedHat versions, but most of the time spent back then was for compiling kernels and TRYING to get X running with a decent desktop manager… I usually got so frustrated with the XServer, I just reinstalled windows.
So, I am going to see how this Linux works for a while and keep an eye on the memory and speed as my site gets more popular and gets more hits.