I like Fedora GNU/Linux since it's split from Red Hat. It appears to be moving in Debian's direction, i.e. it's a community-driven distribution. The key difference between it and Debian, though, is that it will likely have more/better commercial support since it's the baseline for Red Hat's commercial distribution.

http://fedora.redhat.com/

Installation requires downloading a bunch of CD images, but the installer is very well done. It figured out almost all of the hardware on a state-of-the-art laptop; the only item it missed was the strange screen resolution, and it got pretty close.

The first thing you'll want to do is disable the extremely annoying console bell. Edit /etc/inputrc and uncomment the line set bell-style none. It's right at the top of the file - I guess a lot of people want to do that so they make it easy.

You'll want to install apt, which is a front-end to rpm. It makes it very easy to download and install packages because it knows what other packages each package depends on. http://fedoranews.org/jorge/howto/howto02.shtml

Fedora Core 2 by default will hard-wire network interface eth0 to the MAC address of your network card, which seems unneccessary, and makes cloning system disks difficult. You can change this behavior using the system-config-network tool. Choose "Ethernet" then "Edit" then on the "Hardware" tab you can un-check the box that tells it to use a specific MAC address. Don't do this if you've got more than one ethernet card, though.

http://www.brandonhutchinson.com/Upgrading_Red_Hat_Linux_with_yum.html - tips on how to upgrade Fedora from one version to another using yum.

http://lwn.net/Articles/209802/ indicates that in some cases if RPM indicates that its db is corrupted it's really just some cache files that are corrupt. You can recover by rm /var/lib/rpm/__db*.

Setup

Fedy (stuff that can't ship with Fedora for legal reasons): http://folkswithhats.org/

# dnf groupinstall "C Development Tools and Libraries" "Development Tools" "LibreOffice" "Sound and Video" "RPM Development Tools"

Disable SELinux: https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/Fedora/11/html/Security-Enhanced_Linux/sect-Security-Enhanced_Linux-Working_with_SELinux-Enabling_and_Disabling_SELinux.html

VirtualBox: http://rpmfusion.org/Howto/VirtualBox