Easiest Distro to Maintain?

[wincen]

I'm putting together a little server box, and I don't want to spend much time on it. I want as secure an out of the box distro as I can get, that doesn't have too many updates and is really easy to update whenever there are security holes. Any suggestions?

Red Hat? I dig their GUI update tool, but there's always so many upates with redhat. Plus it'd be nice to ssh into it and do it from the CLI

Mandrake? Blah

SuSE? Haven't used it much, I'm guessing there are as many updates as Red Hat.

Slackware? I like slackware, but is there a tool that I can run that'll just grab the latests tarball files and apply the updates for me?

Debian? I've never used debian before. Is apt-get what I'm looking for? Can I just run apt-get and get the latests security updates? If so How?

Gentoo? I'm thinking a source based distro would suck cuz I dont want to wait around for packages to compile. Am I wrong?

Thanks for the feedback.

[pcroft]

Debian is a great distro, apt-get sounds like exactly what your looking for. It's very easy to use, whether it's installing/uninstalling,upgrading whatever!
even upgrading the entire distro can be done with "apt-get dist upgrade" or something along those lines. www.debian.org has a great apt how-to. You might want to try webmin too, I know it's a gui but it's a very nice server admin alternative to the CLI sometimes.

Good luck!

[Dolda2000]

Otherwise, RedHat's up2date program can equally well be run in text mode, so that's not a problem. Further on, SSH can forward X11 connections, so as long as the client isn't a Winbloze system or anything, you can use any X programs you want from the server, so you can use the GUI version if you wish to do so.

[pcroft]

Sorry to post twice, but Dolda's "up2date program can equally be run in text mode" reminded me of Suse......yast (not yast2) is a very impressive text mode utility. Not only for package management,updates, but for system wide configurability. I was very surprised and impressed with the depth that it covered when I used it you may want to check it out!. I can see why it's the most popular distro in Europe.

Good Luck....