I used Red Hat for several years; now my desktop and laptop run Debian unstable. (The tradeoff in a nutshell: redhat is easy to install and painful to maintain; debian is horrible to install and trivial to maintain.) About 90% of the software I want is current; debian unstable can lag months behind individual software release but that's only mattered for a few things, dia and gaim. I run multiple OpenACS services on each machine without any difficulty. And I maintain OpenACS install docs, so following my config is your best bet :)
