Running a server locally can be great fun and you can do so whilst using your computer for your everyday business. If you really want to go at it full hog so to speak then you could delve into creating a stand alone server with Ubuntu Server installed. Initially I think trying to do the latter will be too difficult as a dedicated server correctly setup to be as fast as possible will not have a graphical user interface (GUI) but will rely on typed in commands. Funny enough I have just posted an article about home servers on my new site - see sig. It isn't an indepth article but might be interesting reading for you.

It sounds like you dont really know what LAMP means.

LAMP = Lnyix Apache MYSQL PHP

You dont learn "LAMP" you learn one or all of the things that make up the acronym.

It takes a while to learn that actually. Have a local server to play around first.

What are you trying to accomplish?

Buy a vps, install centos, cpanel etc and learn how to adminsiter it. Although, you don't really need cpanel to learn it as its a front end software for interacting with hosting tasks.