linux webserver on iMac Rev. A specs

[bkolasin]

I've struck a deal w/ my brother to get his rev. a imac in exchange for some speakers that I bought off the back of a truck for $200 and I plan on making the iMac a little webserver for myself. A question or two:
1) the iMac currently has 48 MB of RAM, how much do you think I should have installed? I'm thinking of 128MB, but we'll see...
2) okay, begin holy wars: which distro should I use? I like the sound of YDL 2.0 (which is coming out very soon) because it comes w/ MySQL preinstalled... what I want on the machine is Apache, MySQL, PHP, and maybe sendmail...
3) maybe I'm just looking for a little encouragement... you think this is a good idea? http://forums.macnn.com/cgi-bin/smile.gif any comments are appreciated!

thanks to all.
-bennett

[tooki]

I'd go for 64-128MB. Since the iMac currently has a 32MB and a 16MB module, I'd just replace the 16 with a 64, for a total of 96MB, which should be just fine until you get hundreds of requests a second http://forums.macnn.com/cgi-bin/wink.gif

Pretty much all the distros come with MySQL and all the other GNU server tools. I like Yellow Dog, but I don't know what 2.0 is like, and for now, SuSe 7.1 seems to be the best distro.

Linux makes a marvelous server, but just be aware of one thing: out of the box, they're typically not very secure, and apt to get hacked into. I suggest, after installing using a full install (to make sure that no programs complain of missing libraries, etc), have a linux guru friend go through and do a security check, mainly making sure that only those TCP/UDP ports are open that you actually need.

tooki