I have a server in my dorm room currently running Fedora Core 4, but I'm having problems with it, and I think that I'm just going to reformat the whole thing and start from scratch. My only issue is I need to decide on a linux distro.

My current system is:
Athlon XP 2000+
512MB PC2700 RAM
(2) 250 GB Hard Drives (data)
(1) 80 GB Hard Drive (/home)
(1) 60 GB Hard Drive (/, /boot, swap)
GeForce4 MX440 AGP Video Card

Basically I need the system to support KDE, a couple of terminal programs, samba, VNC, webmin, and a web browser.

I use the server mostly as a giant hard drive, so I don't want to mess with it that much. Most of the time, it's just going to be running a the folding@home client and samba. I may at some point get a development web server running on it, but that is a ways off.

I'm looking for a minimum amount of maintenance and setup. I've gotten used to the Fedora command line, so I don't want it to be terribly different, but I can adjust. Currently, I'm having problems with it being able to get to the internet, so that will be an issue I would like to fix, and would assume will be fixed when I reformat it.

I was thinking Ubuntu, but I really don't know. Any suggestions?

-Jalsk

What kind of Internet problems - hardware device support? Maybe let us know this problem in case it's just distro specific.

As for distro suggestion, something lightweight like Debian, Slackware or Gentoo would work happily since it's mainly going to be server based and for file storage + data processing. Almost any distro could do it, so you could stick to Fedora or even put Mandriva or SuSE on and just install what you don't need. But, for the kind of tools you're after, the first three suggestions would be best, especially if you're already comfortable working on the command line.

The problem that I'm having with my network isn't hardware based. I can get to the server just fine from the network, but I can't get to the internet from my server. One of the things that I'm interested in for a linux distro is that it is easy and relatively quick to set up. I also like it when it has a nice update manager, such as yum or apt-get. I don't really want to do Gentoo again, spent too much time on that the last time. I've done slackware before, but it isn't as easily configured as I like. How do you think that you'd rate Ubuntu? I haven't used anything other than Fedora Core 4/3/2 for a while, so I'm not entirely up on what they're like.

-Jalsk

Well, am sure if your server is up + running, happily talking on the network, getting on the Internet can't be that hard - maybe just a routing issue. It may well be something you're going to encounter with other distros too.

But, if you're heart is set on a new system...! Ubuntu is very nice, easy to install, smooth to run, great hardware support, excellent user support forums + lists, and based of Debian so you get the same well-known stucture, security + stability, but with more recent and modern packages than a standard Debian 'stable' system. Probably easier to run than Debian + Slackware as pretty much everything done from the desktop straight out the box. You'll still have the Debian tools such as apt-get, but also nicer front-ends to it. If you like Gnome, Ubuntu will please you, whereas Kubuntu is better if you're a KDE person since it defaults to KDE. You can, of course, install either afterwards or indeed another windowmanager (such as me plugging Fluxbox!).