WHat is the best free O/S to use closest to RedHat Enterprise ES?

Fedora
BSD
CentOS
Debian
?

closest to redhat would be fedora -- it's a joint venture between redhat and fedora, and redhat has put all their little utilities in it.

What's more stable and better Fedora Core 1 or 2?

I heard cpanel is buggy with Fedora Core 2 but their site says they support it.

I say White Box

http://distrowatch.rospot.com/table....ution=whitebox
http://www.whiteboxlinux.org/index.html

core 2 is going to be more stable than core 1 -- but core 3 is about to come out. fact is fedora core is inherently instable because redhat seems to use it to test emerging technologies (that they want in put in their enterprise products?) = new releases are always coming out, and it is a rapidly evolving environment.

you might want to dump the redhat mentality altogether. since you are looking into cpanel, i assume this is for a server which you shouldn't be futzing with the configuration of all the time anyways, so you shouldn't need the redhat utility suite.

therefore you need to redirect your efforts from finding the most redhat-like flavor to the most stable flavor, and given your list, i'm partial to debian.

WHat is the best free O/S to use closest to RedHat Enterprise ES?
The status of the other two RHEL clones (Whitebox Linux and Tao Linux) isn't clear to me, so I vote CentOS by the folks from cAos: "CentOS is a community-based release of Enterprise Linux. Each version is based on open sources and is fully compatible with versions produced by Red Hat, Inc. Extra packages are made available by the community to augment the original release. The releases are not restricted by per seat licensing in any way. Centos-3 is based on Enterprise Linux version 3..."

CentOS home: http://www.caosity.org/index.php?opt...=page&SubMenu=
The mailinglist: http://www.caosity.org/mailman/listinfo
The support forum @LQ: http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...php?forumid=44

On 2004/09/18 CentOS 3.3, based on Redhat Enterprise Linux Update 3, has been released for i386 and AMD64:
CentOS 3.3 ISO's @LQ: http://iso.linuxquestions.org/
CentOS 3.3 mirror: http://mirror.centos.org/centos/3.3/

Every distro is as stable as you make it. They all run essentially the same kernel, so by stableness, what are you looking for exactly?

cpanel is its own application and shouldn't be taken into account if it makes a distro unstable, etc. If its an application that makes your OS unstable, find an alternative or don't use it at all.