As far as distributions are concerned, I've been using CentOS for my (newer) servers. It's a Red Hat clone, but without the RH cost or service. It's been stable and reliable, without some of the bells and whistles of the newest UIs on (say) Ubuntu or Fedora. And it's free (as in beer *and* freedom).
Pop the DVD in the drive (I think you can download CD images for this also) and boot from it; the thing will guide you. You'll be asked a number of questions (including partitioning of your hard drive), but you can often accept the defaults. You may be asked to choose which package groups to install, which would allow you to install Subversion, Apache, etc. If not, you can always install those easily enough after the OS is working. Various package managers (such as yum, apt, and the like) will connect to on-line repositories and download the software you want to install (with dependencies) and do it for you.
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Pop the DVD in the drive (I think you can download CD images for this also) and boot from it; the thing will guide you. You'll be asked a number of questions (including partitioning of your hard drive), but you can often accept the defaults. You may be asked to choose which package groups to install, which would allow you to install Subversion, Apache, etc. If not, you can always install those easily enough after the OS is working. Various package managers (such as yum, apt, and the like) will connect to on-line repositories and download the software you want to install (with dependencies) and do it for you.