Newb-Friendly Linux Flavor For LAMP Server?

First time accepted submitter bhcompy writes "I need to setup a system to serve 2500 users and I've been looking at a LAMP setup. This is not commercial, more of a personal side project for some friends. I've no experience configuring or administering a Linux server having worked with MS and PICK based solutions my whole life, so I'm looking for something that will be relatively straightforward to implement and not a chore to manage and preferably not completely CLI. I will be serving a forum(phpBB 3 suits my needs and seems adequate) and a variety of PHP driven content with a MySQL backend. Requirements are PHP 5.3.0+ and MySQL 5+. Suggestions?"

Comments

Sorry, but go with what you know

[dbIII]

For a completely unknown platform I'd suggest mucking about with a very small project with just yourself as a user or maybe a couple of others that don't care if it's down or broken. Once you know your way around you can then move on to something else.
Making stupid mistakes in front of an audience of 2500 users would be embarrassing no matter how trivial the subject matter of the site is. You are better off making the stupid newbie mistakes where only you can see them. Having test and production environments only go so far if there is nobody in the project that really knows what you are testing for - if you don't know what you are doing your stupid stuff will go live.

Go mainstream: Ubuntu or RHEL

[Nemilar]

I'd suggest that you go with one of the mainstream/common Linux server distros: either RHEL (for which you can use CentOS, which is essentially the same, minus the RedHat-copyrighted bits) or Ubuntu Server.

Either of these can be configured to use a GUI. I'd actually pick RHEL/CentOS over Ubuntu, and during the install (which is graphical), you can select to install a web+database server along with a Desktop (GUI). The installation is fairly straightforward; the most complex part is arguably the partitioning, although you can use the guided partitioner to just use all free space on the disk. Partitioning isn't something that's linux-centric, although the partition scheme for Linux is perhaps a bit more complex than what'd you would expect coming from a Windows world (dedicated swap device, LVM to virtualize the partitions, etc..). If you use the guided "do it for me" option, you can avoid getting your hands wet with this complexity.

The primary reason I'd suggest going mainstream is that the support will be there. If you choose some OS that no one really uses, you'll be hard-pressed to find distro-centric documentation for it. If you go with Ubuntu or RedHat, you can use Google to get through any obstacles you may find. There are plenty of tutorials available when you google for a simple [do this task] on [this distribution]. For example:

http://www.google.com/search?gcx=w&ix=c1&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=install+phpbb+on+rhel
http://www.google.com/#sclient=psy-ab&hl=en&safe=off&site=&source=hp&q=install+phpbb+on+ubuntu+server

While you could probably use this documentation to complete a task on another distro, it's helpful to have a tutorial for the specific OS you're using; all the commands will be the same, and any dependency problems, etc... will all be accounted for.

Additionally, should you decide that you want to learn more and play around, having something mainstream installed means that your learning experience will be directly relevant to anything you want to do down the line.

As an alternative, you could go with a pre-built phpBB appliance. http://www.turnkeylinux.org/phpbb is a single ISO or VDK that is built on Ubuntu Server and comes pre-configured with phpBB (they have many other applications available as well - highly recommended!). It'll ask you a few questions during the install, and once complete, you'll boot up into a fully-functional Linux server with phpBB already running.

Conflicting goals?

[vlm]

not a chore to manage and preferably not completely CLI.

Aren't these inherently directly conflicting goals?

Easy to manage, is you change one little thing in your puppet config and puppet magically makes it happen, instead of having to babysit everything.

Easy to manage is someone tells you "make /etc/apache2/apache2.conf look exactly like this" instead of "click on the 2nd icon from the right that looks like two mating centipedes, then look randomly about the screen until you find the icon that looks like a discarded kleenex, oh you're seeing an icon that looks like a black hole, well, then click two pages back" etc for about ten minutes.

An analogy is "teach me physics, without any of that tedious math stuff".

Another approach

[Will.Woodhull]

I am surprised that no one has mentioned XAMPP or Portable XAMPP yet.

I used Portable XAMPP under WinXP as a development environment for several years. It comes with a couple of GUI management tools and has an active community behind it. Advantages: you get a LAMP-like setup on a removable drive running under an OS you are already comfortable with. If things go totally weird, you can replace the XAMPP drive with one loaded with an earlier backup and be confident that none of the weirdness has been left in your system. I found that was a very comforting thought when I was going through the newbie jitters phase.

XAMPP is probably powerful enough to handle 2,500 users doing typical Internet stuff (avoiding serving out hundreds of full length movies, etc). So it might be suitable for your production environment as well as development: install it on a fast fixed HD using Ubuntu Server as the OS and you will have a bullet proof operation that is easy to manage and develop for. XAMPP is plain vanilla and seems to play well with any of the Linux servers.

Here is a link to one source of XAMPP goodness. Anyone who is still using Windows should think about exploring the PortableApps site, too. There are some FOSS gems there.