Ubuntu Server is an easy way to get a LAMP server up and running. Older PCs or even laptops can be converted to a basic server for light use which is a great way to bring new life into older hardware and learn a few things along the way!
Grab ISO from: http://www.ubuntu.com/download/server
Download and install UNetbootin: http://unetbootin.sourceforge.net/
Grab spare USB drive and open unetbootin. Choose disk ISO and browse to download location. You can also download ISO via UNetbootin if you so wish in the future. I like to keep a folder organized with useful ISOs so I don’t use the automatic download myself. Once ISO is loaded select correct USB Drive from dropdown menu and click ‘OK’ to install to drive.
Plug USB drive into computer to be installed on. F8 is usually the key to select boot media, if this doesn’t work, try F12 or DEL to get into BIOS and boot from USB drive. Most BIOSes will emulate USB drives over 512K as an actual hard drive, so you may need to change hard drive boot priority if F8 does not work.
Once booting into Ubuntu installation, check out this link for more detail installation:
http://www.howtoforge.com/perfect-server-ubuntu-12.10-nginx-bind-dovecot-ispconfig-3
Most default options will work and you can go ahead and check LAMP server, Print Server, Samba Server, and tomcat if you so wish. Tomcat is java webserver and will be used later for an installation of subsonic, but is not needed.
If you’re following the howtoforge guide on installation, I would stop once you reboot after installation, however step 7 does a good job of explaining how to set up a static IP address for your new Ubuntu Server.
Once that is done, find putty here: http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/download.html
Then, log into the static IP address of your server using ssh, and install nano with “sudo apt-get install nano.” I prefer it for txt files in CLI.
That’s it for now, but here are some configuration files you’ll want to check out.
Apache2 root directory:
cd /var/www
You will find an index.html. If you visit http://yourIPaddress.com this index.html file is what you see in the web browser.
Samba configuration file: http://www.samba.org/samba/docs/using_samba/ch06.html
sudo nano /etc/samba/smb.conf
CUPS printer server: https://help.ubuntu.com/11.10/serverguide/cups.html
sudo nano /etc/cups/cupsd.conf
Install phpMyAdmin for MySQL administartion: www.phpmyadmin.net
sudo apt-get install phpmyadmin
Then visit http://yourIPadress.com/phpmyadmin and login with username: root and your MySQL database password set in installation of Ubuntu.
More on what you can use this stuff for next time!