It's not too bad actually. If you can put a second harddrive in your computer you could install linux on that so you wouldn't have to worry about partioning one hard drive.
Personally I'd recommend going with RedHat, and if you do decide to go with that a full install of the latest version will run about 1 to 1.2 gigs, which has *everything*. If your computer can boot of the CD then with the latest version you just put the CD in boot your computer and go through the install process which has improved greatly over the past few versions. Since linux is gaining more mainstream popularity there are some good books available as well to help with the process.
Once you get it installed, you will have alot of stuff already there like the Apache webserver, Perl and I believe PHP3. Installing mySQL is fairly easy as well with RedHat's package manager. You download the rpm from mysql's website and issue a command like [:blue]rpm -Ivh mysql.rpm and it installs everything.
There is definitely a learning curve, but I would say give it a shot.
