The hard drive on my home dev box ran into some problems. When mounting /usr the hard disk is making scratching noise and stuck at 2%. I don’t know what to make of it, other than that it’s not good.
Handily, I have another 160G Western Digital internal hard drive at home. So, I thought I should take this opportunity to use this hard drive, and upgrade to a newer linux from redhat 6.2.

I am seeking recommendations from folks on what linux i should use and why. Here is my anticipated usage & some requirements

  1. good bit of php/perl coding.
  2. some desktop utilities. May be play a game of free civ once in a while
  3. Not any calendaring or other apps
  4. I fantasize about being able to write c/c++ modules that do some great things, but never got around to writing any in the last year.
  5. I don’t want to pay.
  6. I want it to be easy.

Eron suggested that i should use gentoo linux if i am a hacker and mandriva if i am an app user. Ofcourse, chuck cautioned against gentoo because i’d have to compile every app (apparently open office takes 2 days to compile)

Any suggestions? thoughts?

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