Ok i am back and after much searching have found a company with dedicated servers that have a much better selection of OS's than the 1 i was looking at before. These are non managed and they give you root access. No CP or anything i believe you get login through ssh?

I need to be able to access the internet through a browser on the server, so the OS i install must have browser i can access the net with. Also if you do not remeber my last thread it will be used as a file server using bit torrent protocol. Basically a storing house for my families and friends movies, pics, etc...

Here are the OS's i have to choose from:

Free BSD 4.x
Free BSD 5.x
Free BSD 6.x
Fedora Core 3
Fedora Core 4
Debian Stable
Open BSD 3.x
NetBSD 2.x
CentOS 3.x
CentOS 4.x

Obviusly i am new to linux. But am not new to computers and software. I have looked up info on some of these OS's but would rather take advice of people here because they are very knowledgable and this place has great reputation so i know the advice will be sound.

Thanks for any help
Rainman

well FreeBSD and OpenBSD and BSD, not Linux so if you do want linux, they are out. then you might as well ignore any older versions... if you have no known requirement for a certain version of anything, use the latest. so thats, CentOS, Fedora and Debian. CentOS *IS* redhat recompiled, it is a formal server level distro. Fedora is the wobblier community version of redhat, more for enthusiasts, but many people don't relaise this and happily run servers on it anyway. and Debian is for hippies. So unless you're a hippy, use CentOS if you want a standard reliable server that's very secure, or Fedora for a server you can install a whole lot more junk onto and mess aroudn with. only a guide though, you can install anything on either of them... just not necesssarily what they are intended for.

Now I'm going to be thinking that all day!

@Rainman45
While the BSDs aren't Linux, they're still good choices for a server if you know how to use them.

Debian is for hippies? Geez, now I have to go and switch to Debian.

Then I guess Ubuntu is for **South-African** hippies-----

nah, lazy / dumb hippies

I thought I was more a geek than a hippy...