I just want to confirm something before I do anything with this. I received a copy of Redhat 9 bundled with a magazine a while back and would like to install it to a PC at work to use as a file server, running Samba. Am I correct in thinking that I can do this without paying any license fees?

Yes. Most of the stuff in redhat (including Linux itself) is distributed under the GNU Public License (GPL) or a similar license. have a look at http://www.gnu.org/licenses/licenses.html#GPL The GPL, in short allows you to re-distribute/modify/do-whatever with the source (or binaries) provided that the modified stuff is also released under the GPL, which makes it possible to again modify/improve it.

Yes, here (a bit old, but the essence of it has not changed). Also you might be interested in www.gnu.org, the website of the free software foundation. RedHat is a good distribution, but it's going to stop maintaining linux 9 somewhere april this year (no update patches etc.). You might to take that into consideration if you're planning to use it in a business environment. Fedora is it's successor.

I was under the impression that Fedora is not necessarily stable...? I have actually downloaded the iso files for Fedora, does it have more or less the same features as Redhat 9?

I've not tried fedora myself, so I cannot judge it. Generally speaking when a linux distro is called not necessarily stable it can be considered pretty stable compared to windows. BUT, their are UNSTABLE linux versions, used for testing purposes by people who now what they are doing. I don't think popular gnu/linux distro's are in the unstable branch. What you want with gnu/linux, a samba server only can be archieved with every gnu/linux distro. If samba is not included in the distropackages, the sources can be downloaded at www.samba.org For choosing a distro which best fits your need, you might want to look at www.distrowatch.com

I'm using Fedora on my server, and it's working quite well. I find it's very stable.

Yea fedora is stable. I would use the up2date though if I where you instead of APT. I have had several instances of freshrpms upgrading and installing the same package.What a headache. I never had this problem with RH 9 and APT. I dont know about YUM because I have never used it. I have to use APT because I am on dailup and with up2date you lose that 90% when your fine bellsuck connection dies and with APT it retains the 90% and picks backup where you left off. I just forgot to check details the othernight and ended up with gstreamer-mp3 installed twice. I was able to remove one package. Good Luck Ron