well ubuntu is more user friendly with much updates and easyier to know
and the rest Fedora is also good its really light it starts really fast and its also free

But  never heard of Centos and Gentoo

and what kind of computer do u have?
How much GB of Ram? What processor do u have?

Coolness, it's about a server, not a regular computer, you'd be amazed by the processor and the ram
And I think this is Nathan's area of expertise, so you'd have to ask him Kon-Tiki

It's on a VPS, so RAM and CPU are ok. It's purely a matter of choosing an OS I can work with to manage the thing

CentOS will be your best option, as it is a mature, powerful and most notably stable distro. Get 6.2. If possible, I'd go for TUV (Red Hat Enterprise Linux), but that costs a shitload of money so that's probably not ideal. My favourite RHEL clone though (which I use on everything) is Scientific Linux, if you can get that instead of CentOS it would be even better.

Ubuntu is a noob distro, Fedora is bleeding edge and in no way fit for a real server (then again, DS-Scene runs on Fedora last I recall), Gentoo is a neckbeard distro where you need to compile everything yourself and it's just not worth the hassle unless you really have nothing else to do. Debian is a mature distro, but I just don't like it and would never recommend it to anyone. Just personal preference though on Debian, feel free to choose that one if you like not being a hipster.

If you have any problems with CentOS, I'll gladly help out where I can.

This post has been edited by Nathan, Sun, May 6th, 2012 at 09:04

Bros recommend Ubuntu, cause I can just google "My printer doesn't work" and I'll get tons of solutions. I like solutions. It's an enterprisey word.

But Ubuntu isn't really suited for servers. (And it's a terrible distro! >:()

I'm not really suited for servers either. I'm a developer, not a sys admin If you can give me the same support as Google for Ubuntu can, then I'll go with CentOS

Sure thing.

Ok, first question: Can I bind ports, so I can run server scripts that communicate with client scripts? And second question: Can I install SVN on CentOS? And third question: Can I install BukkitCraft (Minecraft server software) on it?