What Linux distro for a Rails app that needs to scale?
spkthed: Gentoo is based more for the tinkerer and full-time sysadmin.  If you're prepared to spend time nursing the system, compiling everything, tweaking packages/the OS itself for every bit of performance possible, the Gentoo is a good solution.  Until you're talking about really big scaling though, it's probably more time effective to use another distro.As far as the rest goes, it would be better to use Debian before Ubuntu, but there's a lot of other distros as well.  RHEL powers many of the webs servers as does SuSE and Debian and Gentoo.  Once you get past that, it's mostly personal preference.Also, big plugs for nginx.  It's definitely a very impressive software package.