Prejudices and opinions aside, at some point in your career you'll be asked to select a viable Linux distribution for your corporate network. How will you choose? Will you use the same distribution that you use at home or will you do some research and find something that's corporate-ready? Are you up to the task? Do you know what to look for in a distribution to support a corporate environment?

The first thing that puzzles someone new to Linux is the concept of Linux distribution. When you want to get Linux on your computer, what you install is actually a Linux "distribution" that contains a Linux kernel (see here for a definition of kernel) and some applications like Firefox (web browser) and Open Office (word processor and spreadsheet).

In this article I'll include three ways to screencast your Linux desktop with the help of recordMyDesktop, XVidCap and Istanbul. These three applications are included in every major distribution.

The Distribution List is a list of users that you can use to send mail to at one time. Instead of having to use CC: or BC: you can have a permanent list to send to. This is a great way to send company mail to one user and it is distributed to the entire staff.

If you are planning to learn the ways of using and operating Linux then you should try to gain proper knowledge about it. You must try to decide the type of version that you are planning to utilize, when it comes to Linux as your operating system.

In Linux For Absolute Beginners: 3 Easy Ways to Test-Drive Linux I reviewed some simple ways to safely test-drive Linux. All of them involved selecting a Linux distribution to try, then downloading and burning it to a CD. Anyone can learn how to install Linux in different ways, such as dual-booting, standalone on a single PC, or in a virtual machine.

In Linux For Absolute Beginners: 3 Easy Ways to Test-Drive Linux I reviewed some simple ways to safely test-drive Linux. All of them involved selecting a Linux distribution to try, then downloading and burning it to a CD.

Gentoo is a source based distribution which lets the user decide how to optimize their system in many ways and includes building for a specific CPU architecture. Linux Magazine benchmarks four such options; i486, i686, pentium3, core2, and throws in Ubuntu for good measure.

The only problem I see with it is, which one are you gonna choose for THE distribution? Will it be SUSE, Debian, Red Hat, Gentoo, or Slackware? Since it has to be a top-level distribution and not a derivative, it will have to be one of those. Let's examine those choices.