I'm building a little server for a lawfirm and decided to invest thier whole $1000 budget in hardware and use Fedora Core 1 as the OS. I only bought 2 SATA hard drives to use for a mirrored array. The kernel that ships with Fedora C1 doesn't include the driver I need. I have spent many hours screwing with Fedora Core 2 test 1. It includes Kernel 2.6. But it is broken in many other ways.

I need the system to run Apache w/ perl, php and mysql support. When I use the disto to set this up my apache won't start and becuase it can't find mod_perl. I try to use the Test 1 SRMS but they seem to be broken. I start ripping out module after module and compling modlues from sites all over the web, apache.org, etc, etc. The more stuff I fix the more stuff I find broken. I end up feeling that I've created a beta of a beta, not something I'm comfortable with on a production system.

I've only been working with Linux for about a year. Is there a production distriburion that includes Linux kernel 2.6 or a new enough version of 2.4 to support my hard drives? Is there a relativly easy method for building a new installer or some other work around? How hard would it be to install my system on a some 20GB hard drive I have laying around, patch the kernel, then copy everyting to the new RAID array?

I can follow any resonaly detailed documentation and be successful. I simply haven't tried most of my option on Linux before and am unsure about the methods I should employ.

Any help would be greatly appriciated. I've worked on this project for serval hours and have been able to resist the temptation to simply prirate Win2K server and install Apache, MYSQL, PHP & Perl. I want to do things the honest way and use free software that belongs to me.