Philippe Makowski wrote:

> For Server, IMHO the only that are reliable are :
> Debian, Ubuntu LTS, Mandriva Enterprise Server (MES), CentOs, RHEL
> Some others may be also a good choice : Gentoo, Slackware.

I prefer Slackware, although you might not like it if you're used to rpm
(and especially urpmi) and SysVinit (although it seems to work fine in
Slackware 12.1 and above).

I prefer it because it is stable and most of the software is vanilla. It
does not live on the egde, most of the stuff is well tested before
release it out. Consequentially, releases don't happen very often -
which is also good - it means you are running the "latest" version most
of the time :)

Security updates are released very quickly and it has the best long-term
support (releases going 5 years back are still supported and get updated
packages for security issues).

> about packages in those distro :
> Debian, Ubuntu LTS, MES are ok
> CentOs, RHEL : I'm working on it
> Gentoo no problem since you build everything ;)
> Slackware I don't know enough to say

Slackware is great for FLAP server. Desktop is probably another story.
Although I run in on both my desktop and laptop for about 3 years now,
it can be a PITA to compile some stuff that is not available out-of-the-box.

You already have PHP+Apache in main distribution. Install Firebird from
official .tar.gz package, and binary .tgz package on FlameRobin's
website is actually a package for Slackware's installpkg. All you need
is to compile PHP interbase.so module. But that's really easy because
Slackware comes preinstalled with all -devel stuff.

For any other programs, I recommend www.linuxpackages.net repository.

--
Milan Babuskov
http://www.flamerobin.org
http://www.guacosoft.com