Greetings, I want to install a headless server. I am thinking of just installing a basic Debian Sarge distro and run it at runlevel 3. I need to have Apache and subversion running on it. I presume I will also need ssh to do anything useful on it. I am hoping it won't care about not having a keyboard/monitor attached to it. Does anyone have any suggestions on doing it in a better way or have any experience in setting up something similar? Thanks in advance!

Just a followup. I am also wondering whether debian is the best choice. I primarily need those three pieces of software (perhaps PHP and a mail server, but they are not as important). Does anyone have a suggestion for a better distribution in this scenario?

IMHO debian is a good choice. The only problem is that you may want to compile apache and PHP from source depending on what options you want compiled into each. EXIM mail server is installed by default with Debian Etch. Also, go for the netinstall version if you have good broadband service, 1.5Mbs or faster. You might want to look into FreeNX for a remote X display. FreeNX is much faster than VNC or XDMCP.

Debian is a good stable choice as would be slackware (which is what I run on most of my servers at work). If you plan to compile a lot from source then gentoo might be the one for you (my current fave distro at the mo) although installation will be longer as you will be compiling everything.

i guess headless means no xfree or xorg? or no monitor? same as 3dave, gentoo is what im running, but it's too complicated for a quick simple install. I would download the minimal debian network iso and use that. http://cdimage.debian.org/debian-cd... apt-get install servicename ie: apt-get install mysql apt-get install php-mysql apt-get install apache2 for any packages time to upgrade, apt-get upgrade new packages list apt-get update make sure you have plenty of debian sources in /etc/apt/source.list google debian apt-get for a s--- ton of resources. The minimal network iso only has the required services to get going, but the apt can access over 10,000 packages. I cannot really see a performance increase with compiling everything in gentoo. I like the distro cus there's a ton of info on their site, gentoo.org. Compiling traceroute and telnet is just stupid, and there are not many binaries available from portage. I thought gentoo was the way to go until I used a Kubuntu 6.1, debian based non-IT user Distro, install on a separate partition to see if it had a piece of hardware working I couldn't get going in gentoo, and I was disappointed to notice in the base version, not only was everything working, it ran 10 times better than my slaved over gentoo install. Not as stable as Gentoo, but only because of the packages I was running. Gentoo is just not worth the time, but im open to argument and still running it. I did learn a lot by doing it the gentoo way, and im certainly not going to start running Kubuntu. linux wouldn't be fun if everything was all of sudden working, and only wimps take the easy way. 95% of all computer techs don't know crap, and 99.5% of computer techs think they know everything.

@kidtangerine: Gentoo not running quick? Check your /etc/make.conf for optimizations that you can make regarding your CPU and aggresive compile flags, eg -march=??? and -O3 etc. Also check to see that you are not compiling support for hardware/software that you do not have on your system. You may want to look into prelink as well....