Yet another which distro question

[peejunk]

OK I know it's my first post, and that THIS has been asked way too many times but please don't shoot.. read the question at least before shooting.

I want to build a small server in my SME company. I want to test a free (as in beer) Linux distro that could be extended to purchased support/licensing later but staying with essentialy the same distro (if possible).

My needs are for it to be a file server, LAMP application server, mail server (probably be running dovecot/postfix), maybe DNS, with LAMP server running eGroupware and some admin stuff.

Machines in my network are mostly WinXP (some are Ubuntu), so I need good windows interoperability. It's not excluded that the company will purchase a Win2003 licence for a ActiveDirectory server to increase network security. Hopefully Samba4 is ready before that decision so I get to talk them out of it, still at some point I will have to auth to LDAP on windows AD or Samba4 (which will practically be more less the same).

I'm not an expert so I want simple configuration. I want to be able to setup and configure most stuff from the GUI (I prefer GNOME but don't mind KDE). I'm not scared of using a text editor nor shell, just want to be able to configure most stuff from an user-friendly and nice GUI.

So far my choices have come down to

- CentOS (can purchase RHEL w/support)
- openSUSE (can purchase SLES w/support)

I have experience with SUSE but I don't think that YAST does that much to help with configuring in many areas, rather it just obscures functionality. I have absolutely no experience with Redhat/Fedora/CentOS and it's config tools.

I won't consider pure Debian, Slackware or Gentoo. Way too "insider" for my taste plus no clear path toward professional support, however I will accept suggestions for enterprise-style linux distro based on one of those (in which case I prefer Debian based as I have experience with Debian and Ubuntu).

Please don't make this political, I would like practical advice to a novice or personal experience rather than a lecture in some distro being more "true" than the other.

Thanks in advance for your time and your suggestions/advices. Even to those that respond with tldr.

[oz]

Welcome to the forums!

Check this poll for favorite server distro:

http://www.linuxforums.org/forum/cof...rs-2008-a.html

Hope you can find something you like.

[Ljas]

It might be a bit late but you might want to take a look at Clarkconnect. It's based on Centos (Red Hat) but completely stripped of unneeded packages. Installation is quick and quite easy. The biggest plus is the very easy webbased configuration tool they have which allows you to administer the server without any knowledge of Linux, just a basic knowledge of IT will suffice.

I used for my home server for years untill my server broke down (hardware) a year ago and I decided I didn't need a special server. So, to be honest, I'm not sure how clarkconnect is at the moment.