I've been running a Penguin Computing Relion 1XT with RedHat 9 for a couple of years and now need to switch operating systems. I am pretty comfortable running/configuring RedHat, but know nothing about other distributions.

Any suggestions on a distro?

Needs:
Strictly a web server (http, ftp, email)
I prefer to work from the command line (ssh)
Looking for security and speed
Preferably free

Thanks,
Mike

Then Slackware is the one for you. Speed, stability, maximal configuration (from command line off course, wouldn't want it any other way). As for the security, it's not so much distro dependent, as it is admin dependent

www.slackware.org

i'm a slacker, but it sounds like you'd be most comfortable with a red hat-based distro...

if you don't mind using a bleeding-edge distro try fedora:

http://fedora.redhat.com/


if you want something based on the RHEL source there's those also, like:

http://www.centos.org/

http://www.whiteboxlinux.org/


if you want something with paid support try RHEL or SUSE:

http://www.novell.com/products/linuxprofessional/

http://www.redhat.com/software/rhel/


another red hat-based distro is mandriva:

http://www.mandriva.com/


needless to say, there's PLENTY of red hat-based distro you can choose from... and they pretty much ALL do what you need (http, ftp, email, ssh)...

just my ...

any opinions on FreeBSD?

I never got it to install on my box. Curiously I will attempt again, when I have the time

i second slackware. ive always used slackware (was my first distro), it is very responsive even on older hardware and u can configure EVERYYTHING via console.

if u know a lot about making apache, proftpd, mysql and such secure, look for lampp, install it and then secure it on a slackware.

slackware + secured lampp = dang fine server

btw, slackware u can use slackware packages (repositories everywhere) or compile things from source (virtually everything that runs on linux has source available).

if u needed this server distro a few months from now, i could point u to LDIOSse which is a server edition of LDIOS which is a distro im working on thats based on slackware 10.1. LDIOS is made for newbies but the server edition will be made for system admins needing a quick server setup.