Best Linux Distro -- Server use

[Devhux]

I have a Dell Poweredge 2300 server, and am considering putting Linux on it (giving it a try, anyways).

My question is, what distribution would be the best one to use? (best as in ease of use, and compatibility with the hardware). I tried Fedora Core 3, and although it claimed to have the aacraid driver that supports the Dell PERC 2/si RAID controller, it couldn't detect the hard drives that were attached to said controller.

I plan to use this as a basic web and file server.

Any ideas? (and yes I know FC3 is older -- it just happened to be the distro that I had on CD).

[Nija]

Having never used linux as a server-only application, I can only go on hearsay: Debian is what I've heard to be one of the best flavors.

I've never used it though.

[Cubsfan]

You could try RHEL or SLES, but I'm guessing that for your purposes, any distribution will do.

[TruckStuff]

If you aren't going to install X, most distros are just about the same. Deb is easy to use. Red Hat is fairly easy, but I think they have far too many packages. Slack is more confusing to install the first time, but once you get it up and running it works well.

Personally, all my servers are running older version of Fedora Core. Most of the software I've recompiled myself to fix security holes, etc. But I've also been doing this for a long time and know what I'm doing. ;)

[shocky123]

Debian is by far the easiest to use, and I'd say that it's probably the most 'server' friendly distro. We are running the debian sarge distro on all types of servers (compute,storage,fileservers,workstations too,etc) at my lab, and are in general very pleased.

The difference for obvious reasons is price/support. You're kinda on your own when you dont dish out the cash.
I'd go with debian personally. It's very easy to use, and has (imo - too many) drivers for pretty much everything heh. I do RAID storage research and the debian distro's have been very good at having appropriate drivers for these solutions. I cannot honestly say anything about webserver support, but I'd imagine it's done the same between most distros..

~Kyle

[coleslaw]

FreeBSD! ;)