please recommand a distribution for the following applications
 

Hi, everyone. The following is an exercise which I got from the book "linux administration handbook":

Research several Linux distrbutions and recommend a distribution for each of the following applications. Explain your choices.

a) A single user working in a home office
b) A university computer science lab
c) A corporate web server

I found it was a long-time job. So I want to hear your voice. What do you think about it?
Any suggestion is welcome.:)

I think you'll need to get another book since any distro can do any of those things.
If the book doesn't know this it can't be worth a lot.

Yeah, books are dumb...but they are only paper and not mighty silicon :-)

Look, I question whether there is any worth in this thread. What is the point in answering the set questions in some book, for which you can probably look up his answers in the 'answers to questions' section at the end?

You might want to try the 'distro chooser' at
http://www.zegeniestudios.net/ldc/
or spend a bit of time at distrowatch.

For the 'corporate web server', I'd want something that could be installed without a gui. You can hack most things to remove the gui, but fewer and fewer seem to make this an installation option (and, no, I wouldn't be happy installing a gui and just not using it by default). It would also be necessary to have frequent and timely security fixes.

That does it for me for that one.

I don't know what you'd want of 'A university computer science lab'. Virtualisation, maybe? Latest and greatest 'new, shinies'? Can't think of a worthwhile comment.

For 'A single user working in a home office' I'm guessing that you want
-ease of use/user friendliness
-selection of productivity apps
- support????

OK, so its easier to argue for Ubuntu (but I wouldn't) than Slackware, but its a bit bare - you could, as has previously been commented use anything (for some home users ease of use/selection of productivity apps is having both emacs and vi - not me, and not for most home users, but users are difficult), but some things are a bit more of a natural choice than others.

i would use

Ubuntu
SLED/SLES
and RHEL

in that order

my university engineering lab runs exclusively on suse
and the UNI webeserves run on a home brew redhat based system