[Tfug] distro suggestions

[Ammon Lauritzen]

Brief:
I need help choosing a distro. It needs to be linux. It needs to be
relatively lightweight. It needs to either provide ruby 1.9.2 via
pushbutton package management or needs to get the heck out of my way
so I can compile it by hand without breaking its ecology. Bonus points
if it has good options for configuration as a firewall.

Verbose:
Last night, I fell out of love with Gentoo, again. I've only used it 3
or 4 times in the past, but it always treated me nice for what I
consider its primary application: squeezing life/performance out of
cruddy old hardware that doesn't mind taking all night when it's time
update.

In this case, the cruddy old hardware in question is a dual 750mhz p3
with 512mb ram and 27gb of disk. It is running dhcp, bind, sshd, and
tinyproxy for my home lan. It is also currently the only dedicated
unix box in my house right now.

I would like to use it for a ruby project I'm working on, but Gentoo
is dead set against providing me with ruby 1.9 - largely because they
are paranoid after having pushed python 3 on people too soon and wish
to avoid repeating their mistakes. While I admire their intentions,
this is unacceptable. I should be able to force install an "unstable"
package and be done with it. I spent an hour last night and three more
this morning trying to untangle the deeper darkness of their
package/flag masking garbage and came away with a very sour taste -
after getting it to almost deign to fetch and build my package for me.

So, I am left with 3 options:
1 - Suck it up and build it by hand, resenting the system that taunted
me by almost handling it elegantly.
2 - Seek a sponsor and become initiated into the Gentoo cabal.
3 - Rebuild the machine with something less cumbersome.

I'm going with #3.

I need to be able to build this machine in an afternoon without having
to learn another language.

My wishlist in a distro:
 - Linux with modern kernel
 - Current packages for core system that "just work".
 - Option for lightweight install (ie, no x, cups, bluetooth, audio...)
 - Ruby 1.9.2 package capable of coexisting with 1.8
     OR
 - Sufficiently minimal package management to allow me to build by
hand w/o fear of strange conflicts

Bonus points:
 - Good firewall management
 - Friendly Java install options

I built a similar home server/firewall for my dad last week and wound
up using CentOS for the task because Ubuntu was strangely
uncooperative at the time. This is my backup plan unless anyone else
has any good ideas.

Thoughts? Suggestions?

-- 
Ammon Lauritzen