First, the good news. The pre-fab installation options are great. Choose either the server installation or the LAMP installation. Answer a few questions, then go have a nice cup of tea while it finishes. The remainder is not completely hands-off, because you'll have to remove the CD before it can reboot and finish up. But it goes quickly. My test server is an old Celeron 333 with 256 megabytes of RAM and a 10-gigabyte hard disk. Almost laughable by modern standards, but it's still a good machine.

It installs with no running services, with two exceptions: if you install the LAMP package, Apache will be running after installation on port 80, and MySQL listening on localhost:3306. But nothing else--no weirdo RPC or portmap stuff, no SSH, no inetd or xinetd, no spyware phoning home. Any other services you want have to be turned on.

One minor nit is the installer assumes networking is configured via DHCP. On a server? Mmmkay. You can quickly get to a screen for manual network configuration by hitting "cancel" on the DHCP screen.

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