Back to Slackware, 14
Since I do the crypto LVM installation, I follow the instructions from The README_CRYPT.TXT. And thank you to AlienBOB for proving the instructions on how to do a remote install of Slackware.
The install went off without a hitch. One of my problems is I have a Seagate 500GB drive that has the rattles and shakes my whole desk. If I remove it I lose the order of my disks and the system won't boot. I tried rewriting my lilo.conf but was not able to come up with a working combination. However using the hdparm command lets be spin down the drive that has the shakes. I will not post the parameters, this is a very dangerous command and you will need to man the command so you know what you are doing.
I set my desktop to XFCE. I don't need all the fancy of KDE and since this is a server, a smaller hit on resources is best.
Next is setup Apache: Edit http.conf, set IP address; activate needed modules, ssl, cgi; set server name and enable php.
MySQL was turn on and phpmyadmin installed.
PS: Slackware has both perl and PHP install as default. However I need to do some tweaking of php for nagios.
... To be continued.
-JJ