Hello Neil,
If I may suggest, Debian is most friendly distro for AMPRnet software. There are quite a few amateur packages included by default. Myself I use Raspberry Pi running Raspbian (mod of Debian Wheezy) and desktop PC running Debian-7.4.0 I have also Ubuntu 12.04LTS but I put it aside in favour of Debian.
Best regards. Tom - sp2lob