About a month ago, I got some old computer parts from Kah Wai which weren’t in use and set up a headless server using the latest Ubuntu server edition. I stumbled upon this guide which was excellent in guiding me through the process of setting it up and I would highly recommend it if you are new to setting up a server from scratch.
I’m pretty impressed by the Debian derived package management system which makes it very easy to add, remove or update almost any application available for it. I remember the times when I had to deal with all sorts of dependency errors when attempting to install stuff on Mandrake 9.0 (now called Mandriva). Besides the server services such as Apache, PHP, MySQL, I got Samba installed as well so it’s now also functioning as a dump box besides its primary function as a development server (not much so recently though..). :D