I'll toss my vote in the ring for Debian, but with a number of disclaimers.
I went through the same "which dist to use" debate quite a while ago. I think an important question for you to answer first is how much experience you have with linux. A lot of the distributions that might be most highly recommended for servers aren't the best recommendations for a newcomer to linux. I started with Debian, and installed it for about 14 hours one night (over, and over, and over again, etc.), and was incredibly frustrated. I put in a Mandrake CD and it was running shortly thereafter.
While Mandrake probably isn't the best choice for a server, it's a pretty good choice for a first time system. Ubuntu has the advantage of having the system "just work" as a desktop, but it has the debian base system, with which you can familiarize yourself right off the bat (apt-get is really, really nice ... which I heard a dozen times before ever using it, and had no appreication for what they really meant). I learned a great deal about xFree86 configuration, apache setup, proftpd configuration, etc, and then later had a much simpler time switching to Debian (which I now use on all my servers).
In summary: How much Linux experience do you have?
|