Regarding the Gnome/Unity interfaces, once the server is all set up, you might actually prefer Unity.  It basically leaves almost the entire screen free except for a vertical row of launcher icons on the left side.

For those unfamiliar with Linux (which is essentially a Unix clone), it is fundamentally different from Windows. Actual Linux itself consists of a very small kernel.  Most functionality is added with subsystems as desired.  Basic Linux does not include a graphical/windowing system, a print subsystem, etc.  Software to add those (e.g., X-Windows and CUPS - Common Unix Print System) command-line and graphical shells, etc., are put together as a "distro" that now normally includes an office suite, PDF/graphics/video editing and many other functionalities.

Two of the most popular graphical shells are KDE (K Desktop Environment) and Gnome.  In April Gnome released the Gnome 3 interface, which is a from scratch rewrite that takes advantage of modern graphics hardware acceleration, etc.

There are a number of major Linux distros, especially Red Hat, Suse (from Novell) and Debian.  Ubuntu, from Canonical, is based on Debian.  Ubuntu is unique in that it has a standard release schedule: an LTS (Long Term Support) version is released each April (x.04) and October (x.10).  In 11.04, Canonical switched from Gnome 2.3 as the default shell to its own Unity shell.

Although future versions of Ubuntu will support Gnome 3, 11.04 officially does not.  Canonical said that it would be too big a step to add support for a shell that was still in development.  There are unofficial packages from the Gnome 3 group that will install Gnome 3 on Ubuntu 11.04.

I installed the packages and tried them.  Although the installation is pretty straightforward, I do not recommend installing them.  Although it didn't break anything, there are a lot of nuisance things like no power-off icons.  If a menu or dialog box contains italics the text is replaced by small rectangles.  The advanced graphics driver doesn't seem to work--which means that simple things like the minimize/maximize/close buttons don't appear.  (See previous post re Window Decorations.)  Although the layout is very different, the style of the icons have a somewhat cartoonish look a lot like Windows XP.

It seems there is a way to set "themes" but I haven't found it.  The default is pretty much grayscale--imagine Windows 7 Explorer with the directory trees all in grayscale, etc.

Particularly for a server, I don't see anything in the Gnome 3 shell that would be particularly desirable.  If the machine is basically going to handle a few things like start and stop Sesame, backup, etc., once the configuration is set up, for normal use the Unity interface will probably be best  (left-side vertical bar of application icons).  Alternatively, the Gnome 2.3 interface that comes with all Ubuntu versions to date gives a pretty clean desktop while still providing quick access to everything.

Actually, I haven't used Sesame on Linux.  Over the years I tried various versions of Linux and flat-out gave up because it was so geeky and required so much research, etc., to get it working.  With one distro I literally spent about 100 hours trying to get X Windows to work and finally gave up completely.  About 2-3 years ago I tried Suse and that worked fairly well.  But the problem I always ran into was that I couldn't get standard video formats (mainly WMV) to work.

Ubuntu has gone out of its way to make the desktop version user friendly and now even the video formats work.  I did find it frustrating at first, but I was warned by various articles at ZDNet and Tech Republic, "Remember--Linux is not Windows."  I wrote up the "script" mainly for my own use (I have installed Ubuntu now maybe 10 times) because I realized I would not be installing it often enough to remember between installs.  The script makes it a lot easier to do the initial install (including things like the Microsoft Core Fonts and Samba) and once that's up and running most Windows power users will find it pretty easy to do anything else they would want to do.

I still mainly use XP because I have all the software I need and it's all Windows-specific.  The last time I did a full Windows install with all the applications it took over 100 hours.  (For example, I have about five different wordprocessors, and about 7 graphics editing programs.)  My Windows 7 install crashed and had to be reinstalled and I'm in no rush to spend that time again just because the icons and default screen backgrounds are a lot prettier than XP.  (I have a pretty unusual setup -- one 1.5TB disk partitioned as 100GB for XP and the rest for data, 40GB hard disk for Ubuntu 11.04 and 80GB hard disk for Win 7, each boot disk entirely independent.  Eventually I'm going to get a 64GB SSD for either the XP or Win 7.)

In developing under Windows, I have found it generally easier to put most of the code in a few .pgm files that I edit with Notepad ++, rather than using the built-in program editor.

I was just looking for an HTML editor for Ubuntu and ran across a multi-programming-language editor called Bluefish.  It's not WYSIWYG, so I'm not interested in using it for HTML pages, but it looks like it would be pretty good for SBasic and various scripting languages (and HTML if you write source code).  It can be added with Ubuntu => Applications => Ubuntu Software Center => Get Software => Developer Tools => Web Development => Bluefish Editor

My script above says to create a root partition about 8GB, which is very large.  I recently did an install with a 4.3GB root and everything was fine. I have been installing various programs and I got a message that it was running low on disk space.  (I have added a lot of programs that would not be on a server.  This was a 330MB website editing suite.)

A lot of books on Linux say that most programs, etc., wind up in /home, which I have as a large separate partition.  I found out that if you share them they wind up in /usr, which I did not have set up as a separate partition.

As mentioned above, you can simply mount an additional partition in a folder.  I had left about 11GB unallocated, so I created a new partition, copied /usr to that, and mounted it.  (I have two machines with Linux.  To avoid problems of trying to change the active program folder, I mounted the drive on the second machine and made the changes there.  You edit a text file named fstab.conf (File System Table).

Once I did that, everything worked properly.  However, every time the reorganized drive booted, immediately after POST it would display a message:

    error: file not found
    error: no suitable mode

I found out that the file grub.cfg file needs to be rewritten.  To do that, open a terminal (Applications => Accessories =>Terminal) and type:

    sudo update-grub

(no spaces around the hyphen.  As with all Linux/Unix programs, names and parameters are case sensitive.)

GRUB stands for Grand Unified Bootloader and it is actually GNU GRUB.

In my case, I have three separate boot drives, one for XP, one for Win 7 and for Ubuntu. Because I want them completely independent, I had to disconnect the Windows drives.  If I left them installed when I updated GRUB, it would automatically have installed a multi-bootloader menu (modify the MBR).

As I mention above, I have a triple-boot system (3 separate hard disks).  Windows doesn't recognize the file system on the Linux disk so it doesn't assign it a drive letter.

Right now I'm running Win 7 and getting ready to run Acronis True Image, the free version from Western Digital.  I selected Backup and it shows all the disks and recognizes the various Linux partitions except that it shows the file system types as ext3 and they are actually ext4.  Although I'll be backing up the Win 7 partition, it looks like the Windows version of Acronis would be able to back up a Linux drive.  (If the Linux drive is a SATA in a hot-swap socket, it would be a simple matter to get a USB "toaster" adapter and temporarily move it to a Windows machine.)

Do their filenames start with a dot (period ".")?

Unlikely cause, even if so.

Is your rootdirs.ini file limiting what is visible?