A great questions. I also need a step by step guide on howto get apache, imagemagick, mysql etc installed on Fedora..and with how to compile so it works ok with ez publish etc.
I can attest to it running perfectly on Debian (also *Ubuntu), so you'll be happy with that choice. Installing PHP4 on Fedora is kinda painful. It's not very hard to build from source if you got all the dependencies but getting those in place isn't really a lot of fun.