It's a good idea to have you minecraft folder on your desktop. its easy to get to if your a newbie using terminal as i am. just know wherever you save your server.jar file, you'll have to bring it up using terminal. Here's what you paste into terminal after your CD'd to the folder where you server.jar file is:
java -Xmx1024M -Xms1024M -jar minecraft_server.jar
go to:
http://www.minecraft.net/download.jsp
to DL the mincraft_server.jar