Sorry if I am a little late to this thread. First off, I will say that I am a little partial to Red Hat based distributions as that is where I have the most amount of experience as well as certifications etc.

I am not a big fan of Debian based distros, mostly because of some poor experiences I had supporting them when I worked in hosting. I will say that Ubuntu has gained a lot of popularity with the desktop/laptop users, but it is also my understanding that the default Ubuntu server install doesn't include an sshd server (or at least that was the case about 18 months ago).

With that being said, here is what has worked for me. CentOS is a binary compatible RHEL clone. Red Hat provides the RPM spec files to the community and the CentOS team uses them to build their distro. I have spoken with one of the project founders before (I donate to CentOS.org as I use their port on several servers). CentOS offers all the advantages of RHEL without the cost (and subsequently the support), however RPM packages built on RHEL and CentOS are interchangeable (ie you can install CentOS RPMs on a RHEL box and vice versa) This gives you a very stable, long life cycle platform to develop on and deploy with.

Alternatively, Fedora offers effectively "bleeding edge" packages as well as additional packages that aren't available in RHEL (or CentOS) in the standard distribution. As mentioned, the life cycle for Fedora is rather short which can be daunting if you are having to do in place upgrades, but if you need cutting edge package support, Fedora may be the way to go. I've worked in shops before where Fedora is used in the development environment and on desktops and CentOS/RHEL is used for servers.

If you need something in the middle, you can install CentOS and then add the EPEL repository (and for that matter the livna repos etc) to get additional packages or more up-to-date packages. EPEL stands for Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux and is a somewhat stabilized port of a lot of the packages available in Fedora to RHEL (or CentOS, remember, binary compatible). EPEL is free and will not violate your support contract if you do use RHEL proper.

I hope this potentially offers a little more information if you are leaning towards CentOS or Fedora.

Best of luck in your endeavours,
~Art

I meant to include this in the above post.

The Fedora project is maintained by Red Hat and is their test bed for technology. They try new things and pilot packages in the Fedora branch before incorporating them into RHEL.

If you are not 100% comfortable using command line tools to configure and administer your server, there is an alternative administration technique you can use to combine GUI tools without actually running a full GUI on your server. You can install these tools:

system-config-network-tui.noarch
system-config-securitylevel-tui.x86_64
system-config-audit.x86_64
system-config-bind.noarch
system-config-boot.x86_64
system-config-cluster.noarch
system-config-date.noarch
system-config-display.noarch
system-config-httpd.noarch
system-config-kdump.noarch
system-config-keyboard.noarch
system-config-kickstart.noarch
system-config-language.noarch
system-config-lvm.noarch
system-config-netboot.noarch
system-config-netboot-cmd.noarch
system-config-network.noarch
system-config-nfs.noarch
system-config-printer.x86_64
system-config-printer-libs.x86_64
system-config-rootpassword.noarch
system-config-samba.noarch
system-config-securitylevel.x86_64
system-config-services.noarch
system-config-soundcard.noarch
system-config-users.noarch

any of the above tools that has a -tui after the name means that there is an ncurses based text user interface. For the ones that don't have a tui, you can shell into your server using ssh and tunnel the X connection back to your desktop. If you are using a Linux or UNIX based desktop, you can do this by running:

as long as your server's hostname is in either DNS or your /etc/hosts file this will work. Alternatively you can use the IP address. This will forward all X connections (the GUI stuff) over SSH back to your desktop (assuming you are running a GUI/xorg on your desktop). Then su - to root (or use sudo if you have it configured) on the server and launch the configuration utility. If you get a connection refused error, open a root shell on your workstation and run

If you are trying to administer the server from a Windows based OS, you will need to have an X service like Exceed or cygwin running. Then you can use the putty ssh client to tunnel the X application in much the same way.

All this can be done while your server is still in runlevel 3 (not GUI) saving resources and the application uses the X server on your desktop and doesn't need a local X server.

This gives you the benefit of GUI configuration utilities if you are new to the command line, while still saving resources that can be better used to server up applications rather than run an underutilized GUI interface.

Again, hope this helps and best of luck,
~Art