www.gentoo.org
Its a fairly new distribution, but it uses a BSD like portage system instead of prebuilt binary rpm's. The nice thing about that is that you can build everything easily from scratch, with current optimization flags. They do support SPARC, they even have a thread on their forums specifically for it.
The portage system is really nice, you can update code versions by doing an emerge, you actually download the updated source and perform an ebuild on it, using your optimization methods youve specified for your C and CXXFLAGS, and it will actually merge it in for you. I guess like doing apt-get's on source modules and recompiling yourself, but alot simplier. They have support so far for the 2.4.19 kernel, KDE3, latest versions of Apache, PHP, Mysql, etc, and I can't believe how much faster it runs on my machine than RedHat or Debian did. The portage system is really the biggest plus. They use a special development branch of the kernel which gives you some nice Latency and Preemptive options which have turned out to be pretty speedy on my system. Overall, Ive been really happy with it.
ReiserFS is definitely the way to go as far as filesystems go, Ive heard people taking about corruption from them, but Ive never had a problem. It's really great on systems where you are going to have ALOT of files. XFS is probably altogether better as its older, and a bit better supported, but overall, either should give you a heck of a good performance increase of ext2 or 3. Im using ext3 for some of my filesystems, I love the journelling, but the performance is just not what the ReiserFS ones are.
The idea behind it is it installs just what you need, then you manually add the extras in you want. You would get a base package, then you would get whatever else you wanted..
emerge Xfree
emerge kde-base
emerge mysql
etc. etc. It will go and grab the source, then build each one from source. You can also test out updated versions that are considered experimental by doing an ebuild /usr/portage/XXX/appversion.ebuild merge
if you feel lucky. I have my machine ebuilt with both gcc 2.95 and gcc3.1 so I get the best of both worlds. Compile with 3.1 for greater speed, drop to 2.95 if I run into compatiblility issues (havent had any problems so far, but I hear Xfree has a problem with 3.1)
Its just a neat new distro that Im coming to really like. Give it a shot and see if you like it, but if you're in a crunch for time, just go with what you know. Debian is a great distro, you won't hear me badmouthing it...
One thing I would recommend though, if this box is going to be primarily a database server, I'd optimize the hell outta the mysql installation (especially to replace login, it always seemed swamped) . If nothing much else is going to be running there, use one of the bigger mysql config files (like the mysql-large.cnf or mysql-huge.cnf for instance unless you tune it yourself). Also, consider compiling mysql by hand disabling all the extra character sets it throws in there, and linking it statically rather than dynamiclly.
CFLAGS="-O3 -msparc -fomit-frame-pointer"
CXX=gcc CXXFLAGS="-O3 -msparc -fomit-frame-pointer -felide-constructors -fno-exceptions -fno-rtti"
#Note: Actually, dont think msparc is valid, though you can use mcpu=cputype. You probably know alot better sparc optimizations than me...
./configure --enable-assembler --with-mysqld-ldflags=-all-static --disable-shared -with-extra-charsets=none
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