Good website plan?

Ok, I'm gonna be the webmaster of my school's website that we're gonna make. We're planning on having quite a few users on at once, so my question is, what kind of hardware and software would you suggest I use? And what would be the cheapest domain registration plan?

So far for hardware, I've been think RAID 5. Softwarewise, I'm not sure if I should go with Windows 2000, or Red Hat Linux. My computer teacher thinks we should go with Windows 2000, but I've heard it doesn't have as many advantages as Linux.

Also, what would be a good forum to use? Laggy told me to use InvisionBoard, because it currently has the most features, but if we use Windows 2000, that ain't gonna happen. If anyone knows of anything that might stand out, let me know.

One more thing. It'd be nice if we could get some kind of news management system going, like the front page of OTS.net. If anyone could point me out to a good program, or could possibly code one yourself, please tell me.

Thanks guys,
Phate

Linux.

Either Iconian Board or vBulletin Board for the forums and the news.(Most have a built in new script)

Good domain registration : www.maxmax6.com

Here's what we've decided to do:

1) Set up our own server
2) Install Red Hat Linux
3) Install Apache Server
4) Run the website from there
5) Use InvisionBoard
6) I've been learning PHP, so I'm just gonna code my own news management. Maybe even make a little poll script. That'd be cool.
7) Use 000Domains.com for our domain registration. Only 13.50 USD a year. Can't get much cheaper than that.

InvisionBoard has its own news script built in. =)