There have been a few threads over the past months asking about support for Evergreen on Gentoo and Red Hat Enterprise Linux (both 5 and 6).
I currently encourage Evergreen adopters to choose either Ubuntu Lucid (the latest long term support version of Ubuntu) or Debian Squeeze, as these are the distributions that are most heavily used in the community and which the developers tend to use and test with. For short-term development and testing purposes, I would add Fedora to the list as that's the distro that I run & develop & test with - but I would never advocate its use in production due to its abbreviated 13-month support cycle. I can't encourage the use of Gentoo, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Arch, or other distros at the moment simply because we have no active maintainers of those distributions. I know there are sites using RHEL, but on a day to day basis I don't know of anyone regularly installing and testing Evergreen master (or even stable Evergreen releases) on RHEL, and thus there is no assurance that the path to a working Evergreen install on one of these distributions does not involve multiple undocumented steps. However, if maintainers for Evergreen on RHEL, Gentoo, Arch, or other distros of choice step forward to actively participate in the testing and development and documentation process, then that greatly increases the chance they will become a first-tier supported distro for Evergreen. Basically, if you care about a given platform and want to help others adopt it, put your skills to good use and you can make a significant difference. Note: Ben Webb's work on the Google Summer of Code project towards providing packages for Arch, Debian, Ubuntu, and Fedora should help streamline the path to installation success for these distros - and hopefully he will remain involved with the Evergreen community to help maintain these packages.
