first off, i don't want a flame war, i am looking for a new distro besides redhat and mandrake, could someone offer some advice.

Gentoo

Would I be right in thinking that this distro is enjoying a spike in activity recently?

I've been playing with it a little recently because I thought it would teach me a lot seen as it installs everything from the source code. But I didn't want to go for "Linux from scratch" because I do actually have a limited amount of time.

I've been having trouble with grub though. After resolving an issue with a bad magic number on the boot partition which prevented it from seeing the kernel I've now got it to boot the kernel but the kernel now panics when it gets to the xfs /usr partition. If anyone here has had a similar experience then I'd love to know what's going on.

I can see the potential this distro has for being a top performer and it seems like it will be easy to keep it right up to date.

Thanks in advance for any help.

SuSE

What kind of distro are you looking for?

What are you displeased about Redhat and Mandrake?

If you can answer these questions, we can better direct you, otherwise you'll just get a crap-shoot from a list like this: http://old.lwn.net/Distributions

That is a handy site!

Nice one.