In recent months we have been transitioning from Fedora Core systems to Debian ones. Our standard install is Debian stable "Etch", and the standard slate of packages serves almost all our needs admirably.

With one exception.

CiviCRM 2.1, which is (barely) still in alpha requires PHP version 5.2.1+, and the version that comes with Debian stable is 5.2.0. The way around this is to install the Debian packages from the testing distribution, which currently offers the latest 5.2.6 version of PHP.