I started with Red Hat Fedora Core 6. Let me say, I have never been a Red Hat fan, they move things around and they can be hard to locate if you do not spend your time becoming a Red Hat expert. But I downloaded the Virtual Appliance from ThoughtPolice and it was not too awful.

I got vmplayer running on FC6 with a moderate amount of work. But the sound on my system never worked quite right and updating the kernel is generally a pain with Red Hat, they update it for you when they decide you need to.

So I switched back to my traditionally favorite distro, Debian. Lots of folks don't like Debian because you can get back packages occassionally that kill your system, although I have not really had that problem.

I spent a few days playing with Debian but could never get VMplayer to run within it and the sound was equally quirky in Debian as it was on FC6. Debian does some funny things with the library paths and the likes. And the x2 support was still quirky. The good part is that it was more stable than FC6.

So I bit the bullet and downloaded Gentoo. Since you build everything directly for your system, the stability is much better. Being that it was built on a screaming computer, it only took me a day to get it all put together, last time I tried, after 2 days of building I did not have a working X system. I am not a Gentoo fan as yet, only if you have an absolutely screaming system and you are not in a hurry. But for this one scenario it met my needs.