"Suppose you are like me and you want it all. What's the easiest way to do an installation? Should I do a desktop installation and then pop in the server CD to install LAMP? Have any of you tried to install both?" With Ubuntu the difference between the server and desktop install is what packages are installed. Basically: Server: Terminal Desktop: GUI (also has terminal under the GUI stuff) You see Linux is like an Ogre... I mean an onion. There are layers to it. You have: Linux Kernel -> Terminal Type Stuff -> GUI Application (Gnome) -> GUI Applications. That's very, very basic (and could be better, but you get the idea). Servers don't need precious cpu cycles to be wasted on GUI stuff when everything works with config files and services running, which can all be done with the command line. If you take a server install and type "sudo apt-get install ubuntu desktop" it would install the GUI for you. It will most likely take quite a while, but you can do it. I like the plain old server for my servers as I don't spend a lot of time with updates to Open Office and other applications I don't need. There are a number of guides online to setup Apache, MySQL and PHP on a Linux platform. For those that would like to know every setting and/or to learn it could be beneficial to do the long way. the LAMP setup in Ubuntu is to get a quick setup without having to do any of that configuration stuff at the start. You'll have a server with those services running. You'll eventually have to change stuff, but it will at least hand out a web page after being installed. tasksel take a few minutes to run. It's just installing all the packages and doing a little bit of configuration to get your Apache, MySQL and PHP working. I'm not sure what it changes. When they say it only take 15 minutes compared to hours they are talking about the full install from CD using the LAMP option when prompted towards the end of the install. I skipped that part during the install and did a tasksel and it only took a few minutes. Sorry for the messy post, but I'm too tired today to go back and fix it to perfection. jason -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mailman.mn-linux.org/pipermail/tclug-list/attachments/20071206/d8525817/attachment.htm