I’m going to get a low-end old (CHEAP!) computer to run non-stop as a little server for Subversion, Mercurial, Trac and maybe a little other things. It’s 99% for myself – performance isn’t a concern.
It’ll probably have a 1 GHz P3/P4/Celeron, 256 MB SDRAM, 30 GB IDE HDD or something like that, any video card so I can hook up a monitor.
I could get about setting Windows Server on it, but I feel that’s too much of an overkill. All I need is to access my code from my laptop, desktop, maybe remotely, same for a wiki, bug tracker, etc. so I feel that a light Linux distribution will be more than enough.
I want to have a GUI, preferably with Xfce, but I don’t mind IceVM or any other light GUI – it doesn’t have to be pretty, I just don’t like CLI as a Windows user.
However, the advantage of Windows would be that I already have tons of experience setting it up and can directly use Remote Desktop to get to it and AFAIK I have access to Home Server that “just works” – unless you can suggest me a distro made for home servers.
So the question is: what Linux distribution do you think is best for my needs? Or should I just strap Windows Home Server on it?
I would suggest Ubuntu. Setting up/installing applications is just a breeze with apt-get.