Linux

Well thanks for the responses. I am going to try Arch, Mint, and Poseidon with vbox and see how they look. I have read some about there being issues with the fact that Arch doesn't use signed repositories. Is that still and issue and if so, I would appreciate knowing what users here think about it.

LMHmedchem

Since you are already familiar with apt and package manager from Ubuntu, my recommendation is Debian - minimal install.

Regards
Peasant.

Thanks for all of the comments so far. Another thing I forgot to mention is that I use gcc3 and g77 a fair amount. Many distros (suse, cent, etc) still preserve legacy gcc3 devel support and this is something I would like to see available as a package for the distro I use. It doesn't have to be in the package manager if there is a reasonable process using apt, yum, etc, but this is another case where a community is important. I posted a question on the mint forum about how to install gcc3 and it has gone unanswered for two days. This is a bad sign in my opinion.

LMHmedchem

Bodhi Linux is supposed to be very light weight with minimal applications installed. It's based on Debian/Ubuntu. It's main apt repository doesn't appear to be very big so I'm guessing that it uses Ubuntu's. But I don't see gcc3 in Ubuntu. The for is located here. I haven't used it myself so I can't say how good it is. It just caught my eye while browsing Distrowatch.