I'm usally not passionate about distros, since they each have their own hang-ups and problems. OpenACS will work with just about all of them.
However, I installed Mandrake 8.0 yesterday, and much to my surprise it configured all of my hardware properly without so much as me touching a single config file. Everything just worked.
It even figured out that my video card was unsupported, and set up a frame-buffer X display to get me started. [something which RH 7.1 on this same machine refused to do, leaving me with a broken X out of the box. A move which would be death for newbies.]
Thus, i'd probably recommend Mandrake 8 for anyone who is new to linux. You get the benefits of RH, but it's a bit more gentle and the setup just flat out works better.
If you are running Classic ACS, stick with RH 6.2. Getting oracle to run on anything else can be a baffling ordeal.
