(also CC'd to wlug-list for interest) Hi Gun,
I'm investigating a server for my NW of 6-8 workstations. Do you think FC2 or SuSE as a server for file and printer sharing? Is SUse free like FC2 is?
SUSE is free in the same way that all Linuxes are; they're built on GPL components, but some distributions are not necessarily made available the same way as others. You can download SUSE as a Knoppix-like live CD, a single CD "personal" distribution (that isn't what you want for a server) or you can get the packages for other versions of SUSE from their FTP site, and install it manually. You could also find people who have a copy locally, I'm expect Gund or Michael Cree will be able to help. Of those two I would recommend Fedora Core here - this is my personal recommendation, as I know it and like it and I can't really say the same about SUSE. As for "the recommendation of the LUG as a whole", if you're prepared to do everything from the command line and do a lot of learning, you still can't go past Debian. There will be a new version called "Sarge" (3.1) released in a couple of months; you can get a recent ISO file of the installer and go from there, downloading more recent packages off the Internet, or you could install Woody (3.0) and wait till Sarge is released and release over the top, etc.. A large reason people that moved away from Red Hat to Debian on their servers is that Red Hat didn't have an automatic way of downloading and installing packages, and Debian did (apt-get). Now, Red Hat (in the form of the Fedora Project) has yum, apt-get and up2date to choose from, it's not really a problem any more. Also, there is more software packaged for Debian (11,000 packages or so) but for the ones that you regularly need, they're all available in 3rd parties repositories for Fedora.
From my estimates of your experience, I think you couldn't go past Fedora Core. FC3 is also coming out in a couple of months time.
Craig