My personal preference for a development / ham platform is Debian. Mostly because it is maintained by a distributed group of geeks who will never charge for the distro. Secondly the upgrades are seamless and you can even update the OS without a reboot required. I have been using Debian for 7 months now without a hickup, and I really bash the system around with all of my development.
Suse is a very stable commercial distribution of Linux. I have used it in the past. Dave (ve3ixi) has more recent experience with that distro.
Nearly all of the modern linux distributions allow you to choose the simple install (greedy, I get the whole disk) kind of a thing, or one in which you pick and choose what, how and where to install things. I maintain a separate partition for the usr directory and also a separate partition for the home directory. I also have a second HD with a mirror image of the OS, usr and home directories. Am I paranoid or what? I backup from the primary to secondary on a weekly basis.
Check out the links on the linuxham site.
Dave (hkj)
