Hi, I'm looking for a distro that is a good virtual guest on various hosts (Flavors of Windows and Linux), has minimal setup hassle, has gcc-4.1 suite available (I need to compile C++ and Fortran code using this version) as a package ready for download in either a package manager or website. I need it to have a standard bash shell (Ubuntu did something weird to it's shell after 7.04, some of the scripts I need to execute keep erroring on those versions). Ubuntu is out, because of the reason I mentioned above. It also requires me to sudo to run ptlsim (www.ptlsim.org), which I use for research, which is just weird. openSuse is also an option, but it doesn't play well as a guest and tries to install it's own helper programs, which have version conflicts. I'd be grateful if you can throw a few suggestions my way, Thanks, Nameroc

If Ubuntu is a problem because of the non-standard bourne-again shell (bash) I would recommend either Fedora or CentOS. Both will run nicely in a VM under Windows. I've had good experiences with both. CentOS is a version of RedHat Enterprise Linux, so it is more suited for server purposes, but it is a very clean distribution. Fedora uses a newer version of the kernel - that is where RedHat 'vets components that will go into RHEL after they have been shaken out. It is also more intended for desktop/VM use I think.

You can try Debian, it's very fast at compiling code. I compiled the same source code under mandriva 2008.0 and debian 4.0, in debian the compilation time was 2 hours shorter.

Thank you both, I had given Fedora a shot, but had trouble with the compiler. I'm pretty sure I could've figured it out (either by finding rpms or compiling my own gcc), but the distro needs to be able to be set up fairly quickly, so I'll explore CentOS and Debian for now. Nameroc