A mate and I are starting up a new project and what we need is:
1. A server
2. Remote Clients

Where we have the problem is the server distribution, we want one which:
- Is rock solid
- Not Debian based
- Can run a MySQL sever, from text based interface
- Is using minimum resources
- Support for zFS
- Remote developing on server enabling possible
- SSH access
- SFTP access
- Ruby installable

We have tried to use CentOS, but for US it crashes constantly.
Can anyone recommend a distro? don't care which one as longs as it is a *nix distro

Well, Centos is (normally) rock solid (as its free RHEL); maybe we can/should look into why??

I would have to agree with Chris, I've had no problems with CentOS serving millions of web pages and processing millions of $/£/€ of financial transactions per month.

From experience the vast majority of crashing issues end up in one of three categories.

1. Mis-configuration.
2. Developers writing bad applications.
3. Unsuitable hardware.

Common sense and adopting standard practises such as having fully separate development / testing / production environments and using suitable server hardware will mitigate most issues. Never, EVER do development on a production environment.

Servers that are more than fine for testing may not stand up to the loads required for production. While it's possible to develop a website on a single processor system with 1Gb of memory it won't necessarily work when the same server is required to do 50,000+ page displays per day (I know from experience, I've had that pain!)

the problem comes when I install ruby then it starts to get seriously unstable

See my point #2

You don't get what I mean we just have to install ruby on CentOS not compile / interpret or anything else

How did you install Ruby?
What errors did you get & when ?
Exactly what version of Centos?

And you fail to get my joke which was a suggestion that maybe your ruby install had broken/bad code in it. I'll not bother with humour from now on.

Sry I didn't get it - But I still don't get why RUBY makes it undstable, it works fine on OpenSUSE and other rpm distros I use

Use OpenSUSE then.

You should be familiar and able to support the operating system you wish to use. If you have prior experience with OpenSUSE use that.

I have prior experience with CentOS to but I never had problems with it before, but I don't have server experience with OpenSUSE