Hi I am new this world having only maintained Windows-based servers due to my disability cerebral palsy spastic quadriplegia because I use speech recognition software to type and given some of the type of commands are really hard for my speech recognition software to understand
I was wondering if I could install some type of gui
to administrate the server I am not talking about something like cPanel as it only deals with web servers. I will be running predominantly an Internet radio service as well as a IRC server and possibly one or two gaming servers ram permitting of course
am I out of luck and have to go back to the insecure Windows world of overblown ram usage reboots every five days. I'm exaggerating but you get the idea
Once again I do apologise if this is beyond the scope of possibility, but I must say, even though I haven't be able to do much with this server. It is fast, reliable haven't need to reboot it to do updates apart from when I moved to a higher plan. I also apologise for the bad spelling/grammar as stated above, I use speech recognition software, which is not always 100% reliable
I should also mention I had thought about vnc , but am a bit concerned given its security track record

Hmm... Webmin might be what you're after. While cPanel and friends are designed for web hosting, Webmin is more general and can do a lot of systems administration tasks. I don't know what it has for audio streaming or IRC server control, but if anything's going to have it, Webmin will.

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Personally I hate control panels. None of them have full coverage and you end up having to work around them, or worse spend time hacking them just to get them to work right. I do everything on the command line not just because it's the best way to get things done but because it's often the only way to get things done. Sorry if this isn't helpful to you.

I suggest you try webmin. If you don't want to do anything unusual it might just work for you.

thanks for your suggestions while I am getting more confident with the commandline I am very concerned that my server will be compromised and due to my lack of experience I would have no clue I have no Whatsoever that I've been compromised and all of these
idea what all these directories are nor do I really know the proper commands to do certain things
I am not incompetent by any stretch of the imagination having used and maintained
servers as well as run various forms of UNIX over the years as my main operating systems currently using meant and using my speech recognition software under wine
I also one question regarding Apache should I run it as root
I haven't seen any information/guide a simply say install Apache like this
Et cetera
thanks for your help
sincerely paul

I believe apache starts as root but drops itself to a user defined in the config. Normally this user is "apache" or www-data

You can see this with a utility like htop (apt-get install htop)

I installed desktop apps on my Ubuntu 12.04 server, just to see how it worked on a remote VM. I just about always use the CL, but under X windows (ssh -Y) I can pull up the desktop OK using some manager commands (I forget which one right now, which tells you about how often I use it) -- it's just a drain on the CPU.

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http://www.ingber.com

I remember now:
% nautilus &

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http://www.ingber.com

X forwarding is about the slowest and worst possible way to "remote desktop" to a machine. It's designed for use on a LAN, and works terribly over the internet.

Consider instead using nx, which supplements X with caching to eliminate most blocking round-trips, or with VNC which sends images.