Well now, Here's the deal. I am not averse to using the command line it's just that I don't know many commands so I need complete instructions when using the command line. I need to set up Ubuntu server at the office and I'm the dangerous IT guy that just knows enough to be dangerous but the little company won't hire a real IT guy so I do IT besides my real job, which is to usethe computers, not fix them, set them up, configure networks, servers etc.

What exactly are you looking to do? "Setting up a server" is a very nebulous task, it could mean one of a thousand things. If you layout exactly what your needs and goals are, it would be much easier to point you in the right direction.

The trouble is that you are (potentially) facing a number of problems, and unfamiliarity with the command line might be the least of them:

• networking; the things that I can imagine you wanting to achieve depend on an understanding of networking; if you don't understand networking pretty well, all the command-line-fu in the world will only help you do the wrong thing more quickly
• security; I know of a number of organisations in the situation which you describe and every one that I know of in detail is taking something of a haphazard approach to security. In some cases, this may not be all that bad - a risk, but maybe a justifiable risk; depending on the shortcomings and the nature of the organisation, in others it is a disaster, and I mean that literally, waiting to happen. You, or more exactly, the mis-management, pays the money, and they takes their choice

...additionally, I'm guessing that one way or the other (time or money) training courses won't be the most popular suggestion that you could make to your management. (Prove me wrong!)

What you do have going for you, is that you are self-aware about the situation, even if your management doesn't have the same awareness.

having got through the pre-amble, I'll now try and make some suggestions that might actually help:

• www.linuxhomenetworking.com / The Linux quick Fix Notebook (Harrison)
• the man pages and particularly man -k or apropos
• Google. The combination of almost any search term, Linux and tutorial or how-to will give useful information (Other search engines exist. i don't really know why, but they do.)
• ask on this very site, but you'll have to ask specific questions, rather than just 'tell me all about something ill-defined'

The above link is good, see also

http://rute.2038bug.com/index.html.gz
http://tldp.org/LDP/Bash-Beginners-G...tml/index.html
http://www.tldp.org/LDP/abs/html/
http://www.linuxtopia.org/online_books/index.html
http://www.linuxtopia.org/HowToGuides/index.html

Can you tell us which version of Ubuntu LTS you are going to use and which services you are going to run eg email, DB, Apache etc...