I have reason at work to need a local linux installation to do some development on.  My linux distribution of choice in the past has traditionally been debian but I'm happy to use anything debian based, once you've gone apt you can't go back.  For those that aren't aware apt is debian's package management tool and it allows me to do things like:

apt-get install mysql

apt will go out and find out what dependencies I need, occasionally it will recommend additional packages that I might like to install, go download it all, install it and through me into a minimal configuration setup (if needed) to make sure when it's done I'm up and running.  No more of this rpm -Uvh --force --no-deps or whatever version of rpm hell you've experienced from redhat derivatives.

I don't have spare hardware laying around but I do have capacity on my dev box so a virtual machine seems a likely choice.  Now that both the big players have free tools (Virtual PC and VMware Server) it's somewhat a matter of preference.  I did a quick google search to see if there was anything I should know about installing Edgy (Ubuntu 6.10) in a VM and stumbled across this, a pre build VMware image with Edgy already installed.  All I would have to do is download and install VMware server, download this image and wire it up.

My dev environment is 64bit Intel (not Itanium) and I'm running Windows XP 64bit edition, which means IIS 6.  I'm having problems getting the VMware management website started, I've got to research this a bit to see what is causing this problem ("The service did not respond to the start or control request in a timely fashion").

Problems aside, it seems if you've got a need for a VM that's not mission critical you might find one neatly configured already out there, VMTN has hundreds.  Microsoft has been doing the same with CTP's for a while now, a good move that lowers the barrier to entry for checking out the latest bits.