Our Experience in building a server for Drupal so that we can experiment at different levels with different packages
 
We wanted  a local server which provides us a lot of  packages to experiment with  and develop custom modules based on our requirements. We had 3 choices to choose as our main server, Those were  Centos, Debian and Ubuntu . We did lot of research on these 3 and finally chose Debian as our server(Nothing in-depth research just plain fact that Debian has highest package repository).
 
So we installed the Debian server on our Pentium i7 processor with 4gb RAM and 500 gig HDD. The Debian got installed successfully with all the manual configuration for the network and packages. We also configured the network to route our different static ip's to the main server with different paths so as to setup our staging and testing servers.
 
Next were the packages. Some of the packages we installed were LAMP stack, Apache solr(We are a big fan of Apache solr), and usual small packages such as webalizer and traffic monitoring packages.
 
Next we used Aptitude to get the Drupal latest stack and linked it to our staging path. As usual we needed to configure httpd.conf file to get the usual clean-url's working for Drupal(Thanks to well informed documentation and forums on Drupal.org). And we ready for testing Drupal on our server!!
 
We setup our server along with Drupal within a span of two days, and the server is up 100% till now!! . Hurray for Debian Lenny.