I have xp home ( a mistake) and need a local web server for php/mysql testing What I want, is to easily install a local webserver. I don't want to get bogged down with detail and difficulty, and was wondering how difficult it would be to have dual o/s on my machine xp home and Linux? I've seen Sams Teach Yourself Red Hat Linux 9 in 24 Hours which claims to allow you to do this easily with the aid of CD ROM, but I just want to confirm a) This is really easy to do. b) Installing Apache subsequently will be really easy to do. c) By doing this I am not going to cause future software conflicts and bugs Thanks

http://www.webmin.com cgi based web interface for configuring a server with a gui in other words instead of text files it gives you boxes and preaty pictures (my preference as well)

being fairly new to linux myself i can say it's not hard at all. i've set up 3 or 4 web servers on rh9.0 some on apachie others tomcat only. not real easy but not hard either, all done with gui. if you can do php and mysql the web server will be a snap.