Servers and stuff alike…

You know, we have a problem. In my residence we’ve had some issues with the internet for as long as it’s existed, mainly because we get stuff 7 years after they come out.

Take wired internet for instance, it came out ages ago and it wasn’t until 5 years ago that we started having it. and now the issue is wireless.

You see, we only have 10 Mb of internet speed at the moment, which is exactly the same I have in my house, the only difference is that in my house there are 4 people and here we are 103! so you can imagine how long it takes to check my Gmail for instance (I get enough time to go to the toilet and come back) which is only worsened by the amount of people downloading stuff from P2P and such. This is going to end now.

I have gathered the techiest heads here and managed to get some ideas going, starting with the creation of a Linux server to filter all Megaupload, rapidshare…  connections, block P2P ports and avoid any sort of Spotify-alike program (Any other thing that you can come up with will be great)

the real issue is: how?

It’s probably going to be a Ubuntu Server Edition PC, but I have never set up a server myself and neither have any of the people that are going to help me. I know our friend Google is always there but I just read Ubuntu server had no graphical interface, so I have no idea how I’m going to manage (I’m not the best with Linux console).

Any revolutionary ideas on how to help or any program to get stuff working?

Conclusions on Linux

For a few years now, I've always been a bit skeptic about Linux. I always knew that they were open source, free and all that stuff, but there were always a few things that made me not wanting to install one distribution, like the eight hundred gazillion versions you have to choose from and that it will take me a hell of a lot of time to get used to it (also that I hate partitions so...)
Finally, a few months later I formated (to install windows 7) and while managing the HDD, I found this 15GB partition for recovery. Given that I have never, ever in my life used that (in any of my 2 computers) and that I am NOT gonna install vista in Spanish (hell no, the translation hurts as much as listening to a chinese saying “Me gustan los burritos”) I decided to also format that and Install the distribution I heard was most widely extended: Ubuntu 8.10
So got my laptop and prepared my body to suffer an entire 24 hours of formatting, installing (2 OS I had never installed before) and configuring. To my surprise this took like a fourth of the time I expected.
Installation was smooth, dual booting was OK. I had my brand new open source OS in my laptop. What to do now? Check the forums!
I think that thats the thing I like the most about Linux, the overwhelming amount of help you can get online. No problem I've had in Ubuntu that didn't get solved as soon as I Googled it.
Oh, another thing I'm really enjoy is the level of customization allowed, you can change every single tiny little button, image or menu to what you think is best. Windows, a little copy-pasting won't be a bad idea this time.
Overall I think Linux is great but it took me lots of hours to configure, from which I reached the conclusion that they are not made for non geeks. Really. I can't leave my home's PC with Ubuntu because I'll have to go back every 3 days to help my mum out, while any Windows version is easy to work with and installation is as simple as double-clicking a file. Linux, you have a long way to go.
UPDATE:
Ubuntu 9.04 is out, lets see the improvements!