Advantages to RH6.2? I think some important security issues (mainly kernel), better support for new hardware, XWindows 4.x, recent version of KDE. So for my desktop-development-environment a definite improvement. As for a dedicated server? You need to patch a couple of things, move to kernel 2.2.19 for a production machine. etc.
Oracle performance on my Athlon 700 - 256Mb box is good enough. Having 5Gig is cool for production machines, but remember that a very large part of your DB writes are 100% dependant on disk speed. The initdb will still take *long* no matter how much RAM you have. If you have that much RAM you might consider creating a 2.5G RAM disk, do the initdb and load datamodel on the RAM drive and then move everything to a real disk partition. Expect lightning speeds :)
If you're going for 5Gig RAM, consider buying two or more extra harddrives and make a RAID partition for the oracle databases (dunno which RAID level)
