Do you really mean "memory"? If you do, then 1GB is
lots. A perfectly reasonable Linux/Apache system will run in 32MB, and 64MB is comfortable.
If you mean disk space, then 1GB should still be plenty. It all depends on what else you have installed. Som e Linux distributions need several GB for a "full" install, but nobody actually needs that full install - it contains lots of alternatives for things which are already there (a dozen text editors, 6 different web servers, a big bag of old text mode games, every development language you never heard of and so on.
If you are installing Linux from scratch, choose the smallest installation you can get away with. It's very easy to install stuff from the distribution disks later, if you need it. 1G of disk space is plenty enough for a development server used by a few people for typical web development (Apache,
Java, C, C++, MySQL, PostgresSQL, perl etc.) Just try and avoid the tempation to install too many fancy graphical tools, games and alternative desktops.
If you are setting up a server to be used by a lot of people with big data transfers, a lot of hits (many hits per second, peak load), or a lot of complex server-side processing or database access then you will definately need more memory (128MB or 256MB are good, 512MB should handle huge loads, and 1GB is probably overkill), and probably more disk space for the data.
If you can tell us a bit more about your intended use for this machine, we can probably help you a bit more.
