I know it is under open source licensing GPL but have reading some things on this site I wasn't sure. As long as I put that its under GPL license leave all copy rights and don't modify anything is it legal to redistribute linux on my site? I'm sure there is an obvious answer but I couldn't find a clear one Thanks techchalkboard.com

What do you mean by redistribute? The kernel or a specific distribution? Or have you rolled your own? If not, you could just link to a distro. download site, or perhaps contact the developers about maintaining a mirror site. Those are always useful.

Yeah I'm trying to host the best freeware and open source applications scripts etc on my site for download and just wanted to have a few of the more popular Linux distributions such as Ubuntu available to download from my site and need to know if I need to get permission to do so and if so from who/where.

you want to host [b][u]several [/u][/b]700MB to 4.xxGB files from your server? Why? well, let's say you do have the dough to cough up for that kind of expenses, you'd also need alot of street cred for someone to download an OS from you where people will be typing in sensitive information etc etc etc... do what proop says, just ask around if you can mirror stuff for the distros or point to the distro's website/s excuse me if I seem hostile, and although I don't consider myself an expert on anything, but it is known that some people redistribute stuff but alter little things in it, eg keyloggers and stuff like that....

I happen to have disk space and bandwidth to spare and when I said a few i meant a few as in 2 or 3 I'm not basing my site around it it was just something I was looking into to add to my site

Ante raises a very good point though, in that download sites, especially for OS software, must be trusted sites. This is best guaranteed by the distribution developers themselves. You should simply link to those sites, or go through the proper process of contacting the developers and becoming a mirror site. Remember that the source is available for this software, and can therefore be altered for malicious or purely unfortunate purposes. I never download system software from a site that I don't know or cannot trust implicitly.

if you really want to help spread the distro, aside from giving rave reviews, and you do have bandwidth, just seed for the torrents....

Best way to go about this is through the official channels. Contact the distribution you want to mirror/host and tell them about your bandwidth and space availability. Show interest and they'll guide you further. There's no point in hosting a distribution that no one downloads from you because no one endorses you, or knows your name. Once you go through the official channels, you'll be listed as an official mirror on their site and so you'll have people willing to download from your servers. Cheers!