New to servers, old system

[Apothus]

Hi I spend most of my time playing with microcontrollers and assembling my programs and hardware at the assembly language level.

I am looking to start my own server.
Main priority is web hosting just for testing and learning purposes, so i will be installing apache, php, tomcat, python, i assume most distros are more than capable of working with these.

It may later be used as a media pc box, just to stream from my windows file server

The main problem i have is the age of the computer that i am using. It is an amd athlon xp 2000+ with 256mb of ram. I have tried dl a few different distros with no luck, which distribution should i begin with on this platform that can handle everything i want to do (web server priority)?

[spiderbatdad]

I have a very similar setup. Installed xubuntu 8.04 for a light simple gui, and then added the server apps from synaptic package manager.

[kamaji792]

The spec you quote for you system should work. Especially if you don't install a GUI.

I run the 'Ubuntu 8.04 lts Server' version on an Athlon 1800+ 512MB RAM. Does a little bit of file serving (Samba) and web serving (Apache) for 5 WinXP boxes. Runs fine.

What specific issues are you having?

[Iowan]

I have Hardy (8.04) running LAMP on much lower spec machine (HP Netserver LC II - dual 266 MHz processors). Certainly not speedy, but it's adequate for self-training webserver.