I don't have that much experience doing stuff such as editing and recompiling the kernel. As far as setting it up, I guess I am ok at it. The distros I have used so far are Rad Hat 9, SuSE 9.1, Knoppix, and PCLinuxOS. The last 2 are just boot cds. I don't know much of how the others such as gentoo and debian work cause I haven't tried them. I was looking to setup a server that would host files and possibly a website sometimes. I would also like to try doing roaming profiles, but as far as I know, Linux doesn'thave support for hosting Windows XP roaming profiles and Windows Xp Home (which is what I am running) doesn't have support for them either (unless there is a workaround).