(warning nerd alert below)
Over the past few weeks I have been trying out some different linux configurations (debian, suse, and red hat) all on some reasonable hardware. I think its important that developers of any field dive into and setup a linux install… be it any distro. It give you a really good sense of using command line tools and can really drive home the differences between server side/ client side languages and techniques. 

If you own/use, mac parallels is a great application to get started and play around with some linux distros without needing a dedicated machine. I have had the best luck so far with unbuntu and openSuse. Later this week I will post my install/usage feedback on all the distributions so far. Along with some instructions on getting a LAMP stack working on unbuntu in a couple easy steps, and getting vnc,ssh, and ftp configured and running locally. Nothing beats having a local test environment to test in before they go public.