What Distro do you have and what do you use it for :-)

[kakariko81280]

I started on red hat when a fellow geek (many years ago) said "Have you heard of Linux?" and handed me a CD.

I went through Mandrake and now I have Slackware installed on my laptop. I'm planning on trying out Gentoo, Ubuntu, or SuSE.

I started with it because I am a geek and I want to tinker. I stay with it because open source means I never have to deal with someone elses bad idea. A point that was forcibly driven home when my last phone had had features disabled by Vodafone so they could make more money.

I use my laptop for everything. Internet, email, programming, kismet, and games (quake, neverwinter nights, etc). It works out quite well becuase by the time a native linux client is made, the game has come down in price and I have upgraded to hardware that will run it.

[Catfishforsupper]

Radio Station:
Business Office - Fedora Core 1 (Win4Lin kernel) - Office, Book keeping and Billing, Email, Word Processing.
Sales Office - Fedora Core 2 - Sales, Word Processing, Email.
Studio - Fedora Core 2 - Internet, Program downloads, weather info, E-mail, play some MP3 files, Editing with Audacity, Play back news and sports.
Server - Slackware 10.1 - Streaming audio (Shoutcast)
Radio Automation - Windows XP - WireReady (This box is very limited to web access in and out.)

Restauarant:
Debian Etch - Book keeping, Email, and to use for accessing Radio Station computers via ssh and tightVNC.

Home:
Wife's computer - Fedora Core 4 - Whatever she wants to do with it.
Children's computer - Debian Sarge - Whatever they can do with it.
My Laptop - SuSE 9.2 - For mobility.
My Main Home Computer - My favourite box! Multi-boots between Slackware 10.2, Mepis Lite, Windows XP, Beatrix, SuSE 9.2 and Slackware 10.1. I use it for everything from research to web surfing, Email and anything else I so desire, mainly with Slackware 10.2.

Dapper, are you still posting in this forum? If so, I'm a newbie to Linux and I'm searching for an answer to these questions:

What is the best distro to install on one server (should I choose 32-bit or 64 bit?) to host websites and stream audio?

I've taken that quiz for distros and it suggests Mandriva.

Once I have decided on the distro and architecture, how do I stream? I've been told Shoutcast is for amateurs but I see you own a radio station and use Shoutcast; I think it a must to offer Windows Media Player.

Bottom line: I'm looking for a hardware and software configuration to stream audio and host websites from one server.

P.S. Is a Windows Media Encoder synonymous with a codec?