Best Distro For ...

Hi I am interested in getting to know more about linux guts. I want to try and modify a distro to do the following and am wondering what would be the best distro to startwith. I want the OS to be able to handle basic drivers. Video(256 color is fine), sound(simple chime and beep will work), input(mouse and keyboard), cdrom, HD, and networking. Networking is the biggest one. I realize that getting wifi drivers are dificult but nic drivers are pretty well supported right. Well I would like it to boot up and connect to a central server. The central server will have more up to date drivers and can figure out what the system will need and test for the best fit for drivers. After that the server will act almost like a VMWare server. It will have hardware that will run a virtual machine and broadcast it to the booting up machine. The server would send the output back to the computer. Video, sound, printer stuff like that. The client computer would send input info back to the server. Keyboard, mouse, touchscreen, cdrom, stuff like that. It would then sync with the computer getting nexessary inforrmation to run offline. after that as long as they are maintaining a connection the information will be sent to the server and if they get dissconnected they client machine will keep it up and running and would store the data until it could re-establish a link and then it would sync the data. So with that in mind, and I realize that some of this has been done up to a point with VMWare already what distro would be the best one to get started with. It would hae to be pretty light weight tho.

thanks you too.