First of all, I'd check with your ISP to make sure they hosting they give you is allowed to have a tracker on it. As we all know, the now-defunct EDJ opted to ignore a similar stipulation with their hosting service, and got spanked for it. Make sure your host is BT-friendly ahead of time.
As for trackers, there are lots of free packages out there. Lynne has researched this more than I have, and I'll PM her and ask her to pop into this thread and comment further. But even with these packages, I would recommend you get familiar with mySQL and PHP. Depending on the your host, you may or may not need to learn any Unix commands...but I doubt this will be a problem.
mySQL and PHP are really quite easy, the former even more so since you're not planning on actually setting up the server, but rather just maintaining the site. Your host will have the mySQL server configured for you, so you'll just need to learn how to build SQL queries and maintain the database. PHP is a bit more invovled, but is really quite a simple language. I was able to pickup a good deal of it over 2 weeks I spent playing around with my new personal website recently, and I have a very weak programming background. Check out
www.php.net for information.
Hope this helps...
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