encyclo - 9:06 pm on Mar 9, 2005 (gmt 0)

I would agree that the hardware is not too important - my main machine is a 500Mhz Celeron with 128Mb of RAM, and it runs Linux just fine with a lightweight window manager. I have a test web server running just fine on a 133MHz pentium 1. You should avoid any very new or unusual hardware - anything that has been around at least 6 months usually works. As it is a test machine, don't bother with fancy graphics cards and the like. Buy any cheap procesor (Celeron or something like that) and it'll run fine, especially if you don't load X (the graphics) at all.

If you want Red Hat, go for Fedora as it is very similar to RHEL, but has a better community support behind it. I assume you're talking about a web server, which is about as basic a task as it gets for a Linux machine. I haven't used Fedora, but usually you can install Apache, PHP, etc. automatically during the initial install process. You should also choose the development packages, including gcc (compiler) for when you want to roll your own Apache install. You'll need sshd to be able to connect remotely - which you'll want to do if you are to simulate running a truly remote server.

Other than that, go with the defaults - you can change stuff later. To start with, install the graphical interface - Gnome is the Red Hat default window manager, and it is a good one.

When I first installed Linux, I did it on my main machine, wiping Windows completely. The install went fine, and I've never looked back. It is easy to get a basic system running - after that, you can tweak things to your heart's content!