Over the last few weeks I have been setting up my home server again. First I had to find a computer capable of doing the job, which I managed to acquire from a friend of mine.

The computer I got hold of was an ex-office computer. Its a Dell desktop PC which came with 128mb ram (shocked I know) 2mb graphics card and 20gig hard drive and I think a 500mhz processor, but I could be wrong, and havn’t bothered checking. Good thing though, it’s all black.

So, what to use, windows XP which for all its crapness, the server stuff although bloated is simple to set up and run. COnsidering the files are all .exe I could have had it up and running in no time.

I wanted to use Linux, but what flavour? There are many Linux distros out there that are specifically designed for setting up a server, but i’m not that skilled with linux and besides, I wanted something that looked good aswell as did its job.

I settled for Ubunut in the end. The install was simple, took around 20 minutes for everything I needed, and that includes the format time. Once I was in, all I had to do was download Xampp for Linux and follow the instructions.

This was the most simple server I have set up. Be warned, Xampp is not really intended for use as a public server, I simply use it for local development of PHP and webdesigns.

Having said that, I highly recommend you trying it if you want to learn PHP but cannot afford a webhost to use it on.

Setting up the FTP server was the hardest task. By default Ubunut puts the htdocs folder under the root users account. The root users acocunt is also disabled by default on Ubuntu to prevent you from breaking your system. This lead to me being unable to delete or add files to the server via FTP. In the end, I got fed up of trying and shared the directory using Samba with rights for my main user account to add/edit and delete files. It’s now much quicker and easier to use.

I will try and sort the FTP in future and put some info up about it aswell as setting up the server and installing all you need.

For now, i’m content to have a simple webserver to test with, and a media server to stream my movies and music around my home.