That's a pain. I have 3 Fedora Core 7 systems at the house and two Debian 4.0. The lab in Virgina is Debian 4.0. The server in Virginia is Core 5 awaiting update to Core 7. The embedded systems started as Slackware 9.0 because that was the example image provided by Diamond Systems to go with their boards. I needed extra items in my kernel to support OLSR mesh networking, so the canned example image wasn't enough. Diamond has only updated their DSCUD 5.92 kernel driver up to kernel 2.6.11.10. It has problems with the current 2.6.18 vintage. Keeping up with the constant change includes dealing with hardware/software vendors that are also behind the curve. Linux will soon ditch the x386 world. You'll need a more modern CPU to boot it. That will leave many of my PC104 CPU boards abandoned.
Myrddin
If you really need free as in price skip fedora and go with centos..