Looking for Suggestions

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

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.