Go with Debian stable. It's rock-solid. I've done very poorly with Ubuntu. I've tried installing it twice. The first time, it installed successfully but the

Go with Debian stable. It's rock-solid. I've done very poorly with Ubuntu. I've tried installing it twice. The first time, it installed successfully but then when I rebooted it trashed my RAID configuration and dropped into single-user mode. The second time, which was last week, the installer kept hanging in bizarre places. The whole distribution just seems to be geared toward very simple hardware configurations and chokes at the slightest violation of its expectations. Also consider a BSD, though.