I would use Gentoo. Its the easiest to work with non-standard packages and since all packages are built from source, you can complile them as you wish with the use of USE flags. Like Loren said, Gentoo is not made for production servers because its much more bleeding edge. That said, it does not sound like your use will be "production" in the sense that it absolutley cannot fail no matter what. I have been running ~3-5 Gentoo boxes since 2003 and I have never had one crash. Two of them are primary/secondary x500 authentication servers (Mike will know what they are). Brock On 8/13/05, Loren H. Burlingame <there.can.be.only.two.apparently at gmail.com> wrote: > On 8/13/05, Mike Miller <mbmiller at taxa.epi.umn.edu> wrote: > > I want to do mostly scientific work plus email on a GNU/Linux server. > > Apparently all the major distros have 64-bit versions available, which > > helps. Now I'm trying to decide which distro will be best for my uses. > > > > I am not sure about the other distros but Gentoo is primarily geared > toward the Linux desktop market. That is not to say it does not make a > great server (I use one at home for personal uses and it has run for > years with no problem) but for a high availibility production > environment I would probably be hesitant to go that route, probably > favoring, instead, a well vetted distro like SuSE or Redhat/Fedora. > > -- > Loren H. Burlingame <loren at lhb.name> > GPG Key ID: 0x112DCF4F > "Irony can be pretty ironic sometimes." > -William Shatner (a.k.a. Buck Murdock) > > _______________________________________________ > TCLUG Mailing List - Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota > tclug-list at mn-linux.org > http://mailman.mn-linux.org/mailman/listinfo/tclug-list >