DK,
The only issue there is that most of the "for sale" linux distributions are sorely lacking and need extensive modification prior to being useful in any large distributed environment. You need to tune the networking, local filesystems, strip away a bunch of crap you never use and so on. Then you need all the facility compiler and libs installed, source code versioning, I can go on for hours but you get the picture.
In the universe of big visual effects the major facilities all have big IT departments and development people on staff that all need much more bleeding edge than you're going to get from a 'for-sale' distribution like Red Hat who's target market is now Joe's Accounting and Fred's Architecture along with a bunch of people using it for back office stuff.
In my book supporting a single dist from a single vendor is stupid. Pixar has it right. Support a compiler and a glibc on various platforms and be done with it. This is probably tougher for AW because they have issues with open GL, KDE and so on... so it's not quite that simple. But understanding that at most facilities where you've got big numbers of seats installed they need the flexability to do what they want with the facility linux distribution.
If a big VFX job is going to ILM over 'Bill and Ted's FX Facility' you can assume there are some development issues wrapped up in the job that make smaller facilities less of an option for the studio, that often means custom code that integrates with Maya, PRman, and a million other apps and plug-ins. This means bleeding edge development and that's not going to happen on standard distributions without a lot of tweaking.
Novell, well I won't go there. But SuSE and Debian as well as FC seem the logical places to have support and I agree with you on that.
As for the 'setting up the pipeline' issues you raise, I have to say after setting up or consulting on at least 5 pipelines for major feature projects in the last few years I can assure you calling RedHat support was never a concern. Quite frankly, for 90% of us, the guys in tech support are simply going to slow us down or waste our time altiogether. Google and rpmfind.net are your friend in these cases 99.999% of the time. Most facilities I have worked at had Linux people on staff that were capable of running circles around most of the folks at Novell or Red Hat so as for support, for your core linux distribution... it's about as useful as Alias support. Hire a good IT guy and be done with it.
