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What is best depends a great deal on personal preference and your ultimate purpose - is this just something to mess around/learn with, or will it be a production environment? Are you doing development, or what? If you are new, I'd suggest the following:

- RedHat, becaused it's the most prevalent distribution. Any of the big ones would work (Debian, Suse). Install v 7.2 or 7.3 with ext3 filesystem - fast recovery from unexpected power outages.

- Apache 1.3.26, not Apache 2 because not everything works with v. 2 yet.

- mod_perl installed with apache.

- perl will install with a standard distribution by default. You can then update using the CPAN modules. You use a couple of perl command modifiers to enter a CPAN shell to update and add perl modules (ie. database connectors, etc), and can even update perl versions that way (for when perl 6 comes out).

- I recommend slapping php and a mysql database instance on the machine.

- If you are into learning, the latest jdk from java.sun.com is a good idea (1.4.0).

- Sun has a free download of Forte (their Java IDE), or you can get Netbeans, also from sun, also free.

- Gnome or KDE, as your preference dictates. I prefer Ximian-Gnome, because it's got some cool extras like evolution, a Microsoft Outlook clone for linux, except that it works and doesn't get every virus that comes by.

If you have questions, you can send me a direct message - I've been doing linux support for almost 5 years now (yes, I get paid fairly well for playing with neat toys). I'm currently working on a project migrating 200+ applications from MS Internet Information Server and ASP (VBScript and JScript) to linux on IA64 (64-bit) Itanium 2 processors and ultimately into a Java Application Server.