Hi,
At the most basic level, all linuxes are essentially the same - i.e. built from the same core kernel source code tree at
. Some distros write their own add-on patches to the kernel but other than that its identical.
I would suggest getting a redhat 7.1 / 7.2 or Suse 7.2 / 7.3 and, post-install, compile your own optimised kernel from the kernel.org source tarballs (or install the srpms in which case you'll get the patches too which you may want to apply). It isn't that difficult to compile a custom kernel and you can set optimisation for your class of processor (vs i386) plus omit all the bits that you don't have the hardware for. Also, if you prefer, you can compile into the kernel itself stuff that you'll find provided by redhat et al as modules.
Once you have an optimised kernel its really up to you what services are running - use '/sbin/chkconfig' to turn off everything you don't need.
Most of the distro versions shown above come with both 2.2 series kernels and 2.4 series. If you want to be conservative you can use an older 2.2 series kernel but personally I haven't touched those for a long time now and, at version 2.4.17, its a long way past the problems you get in a point zero release.
For security, its most based on PAM (
which again is the same across all linuxes. Then theres the firewalling code, i.e. iptables/ipchains . Apart from that you're down to the security features of the stuff you use, like Apache and, like the kernel, all distros build their apache packages from the same basic source code.
Hope this helps
