[Trumpcard]

Slackware is a good stable distribution, my only complaint is that its slow on updates. They'll go years between releases. I use Gentoo at home, and RH on my work servers. Gentoo is alot of fun, it's quickly become my favorite distribution. Most people get hooked to it once they try it. Theres another really cool distro out there thats very gentoo'ish with a spell theme, you cast programs out of a grimoire to download and build them to the local box.. Neat concept.

You're probably good with about any distro out there. I really like RedHats implementation, they've made several very cool tools and addons for linux that I like. Debian is good and solid, Slackware too, but I have to say that my experiences with Gentoo has blown them all away. For a hands on techie geek type that likes to have total control over how the system is put together, Gentoo is the coolest.. I would never use Gentoo in a mission critical situation, but for a home machine its pretty darn cool.

I don't think you need to worry about resources on the box. I use to run X/KDE , EQEMU world and 20 zones, mysql, and my webservers all off my dual 400 celery server and didnt have too much trouble. Its since been upgraded to a 2.4 Ghz Dell PowerEdge 600SC, but it ran everything great. I like having an X environment on my boxes (if I use them frequently). There are just too many cool X only tools and games out there.. How can you play XMame on your linux box if you don't install X afterall !