1st linux distro, go with RedHat, easiest out of the box distro in my opinion (7.3 made me change distro's though). Debian is good if you want a good stable server. Gentoo is awesome if you want bleeding edge performance and have the linux skills to support a buggy box.
If you don't know anything about it, just go to redhat.com, or linuxiso and download the iso images and burn them to a cd. If you burn them right, the cd's will be bootable, and you wont even need to make a bootdisk...
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