I just built my own Linux "superserver" at the office based on the latest Mandrake Linux distro - and must say we've been more than pleased with it. I would echo the recommendation to avoid Apache 2 - this version is multi-threaded and many of the cool add-ons are not (besides, you really don't gain much from a multi-threaded web server in the Linux environment because the threads show up as regular Linux processes in the process list, and they aren't *that* much more responsive than the standard "preallocatd servers" approach).
We've also lately installed Tomcat, and the associated Apache web interface, so that we can seamlessly offer java server pages.
This is so much more fun than the old WIN2K server we had. Congrats on the nice move!