Originally Posted by
PTravel
I'm not sure I'd know how to manually install Webadmin, but I plan to spend some time fooling around in Linux before I try to set up a server. My dedicated experimentation box is a 500 MHz AMD K6 which, I suspect, will be fast enough for my purposes.
I think that should be fine... I might recommend the server version though, since its doesnt have a gui.... but that in itself makes things tricky...
there are some good install instructions for webmin here:
http://ubuntuforums.org/archive/index.php/t-7507.html
its really quite simple...
I still think ubuntu lacks good gui admin tools for services... so another option is OpenSuSE 10.2 which has 'yast2' which is a great (but bloated) admin tool set. With an 'X server' (which is really a client) you can run the gui admin tools on any remote computer. Its been a while since I've searched for an X Server on windows, but the basic premise is that run a small app on your windows desktop and then you can launch programs on the linux box and they display their gui on the windows screen (gross over simplification)... but with things like yast on SuSE its a very easy way to manage a server.
Nevertheless, with webmin on ubuntu server 6.10, things work very well. In fact, I was blown away when I clicked "windows file sharing" and it said: ' samba is not installed, click here to download and install samba'...so it went out and did the apt-get and installed samba and set up windows file sharing all via the web interface in less than 2 minutes.... really made a gui superfluous.