I am moving away from Redhat and Mandrake on my Linux boxes (Or thinking about it anyway) and want to go with a "free" GNU linux flavour. Does anyone have any suggestions?

My needs are for a set of Network servers, mainly email and Proxy, and webservers.

Well I kinda thought about that also because I was concerned with the latest changes that Redhat has made. So I got busy digging around in my collection of 143 versions of linux operating systems which I have downloaded.
I guess that I have just plain got used to the Redhat look and feel because none of the other brands feel right !
I took the plunge and downloaded / installed Fedora and guess what? It's virtually no different than Redhat!!
I have it setup as a Samba PDC, dns, dhcp, web and ftp server. Well, the web and ftp services are not being used right now but they all work.

The bottom line is, IMHO you may as well stick with Redhat aka Fedora since it does work.

That's just my two cents.

Edit: Just so you don't think I'm a total freeloader, the first linux I bought was Redhat 6.2 . I have bought several versions of linux from third party distributors also.

Debian and Gentoo are both "free" ones.

Debian ( http://www.debian.org/ ) is somewhat difficult to install especially if you have recent hardware. But once itself it is stable and requires little administration time for upgrade/install new stuff. Debian has a stable, testing and unstable distribution. If you use the stable, when you upgrade, you get only security patches, so your system stays stable.

Gentoo is source based but has also pre-compiled package. I did not use it much so I cannot tell much. (I am currently switching from Debian to Gentoo). They take several ideas from the BSDs and they have LiveCDs for both Intel and PowerPC.

There are also non-Linux/GNU such the BSDs that are usually used on servers. They support less hardware than Linux but all the same software basically runs on them. I intend to learn FreeBSD but did not have time playing it with it yet.

iTux

Fedora is'nt a choice. I dont want "cutting edge" stuff. I dont want beta software or testing stuff. Thats what ferdora is, it is a testing ground for stuff to prove before it gets into the main RH dist.

I just moved away from redhat to Slackware. It works well but one thing, and I feel strange, is that I use dropline gnome desktop and I don't know how to change mouse theme, and it seems that nobody knows.

slackware, mandrake,PCQ Linux, may be freeBSD