new installation & updates

[Michael D. Berger]

I am graduating from RH-E-WS-4 to fedora.  On the web
site, I was impressed with the number of updates that
are available for the latest fedora core.  Is there
some way I could obtain guidance on what I really need
in a new installation?  I am especially interested in:
   netfilter, libipq, etc.
   apache
   avoiding spinlock panics
At this point, I do not want to get into selinux.
Thanks for your help.
Mike.
--
Michael D. Berger
m.d.berger at ieee.org