For someone without much linux experience I would recommend sticking with the official releases from the parallella web site based on Ubuntu.
If you want to get more involved Arch Linux ARM Kernel looks like a good starting point provided you know what you are building and match up the various sources.
My environment at
https://github.com/peteasa/parallella allows you to build epiphany code on either the parallella or the host build machine, it is up to you. At the moment it provides a development environment for parallella, fpga and epiphany (but I have not yet built in the e-gdb epiphany debug tool). On the fpga it is based on the elink redesign, however I added the hdmi cores to get hdmi working. On the linux I use a set of Yocto recipes that allow me to create a simple linux environment or (with core-image-sato) a full X windows based linux desktop environment. I can switch between the official Parallella kernel and the Analog Devices Inc linux kernel. I added the ability to build in the epiphany-sdk into the linux distribution for use on target and also by including the epiphany-sdk in the yocto host based SDK I can build epiphany code on the development machine. I think its a great environment but then I am a bit biased and also have the Xilinx Vivado tools installed as well as all the linux build tools so I can work on both the hardware HDL and the software.
Peter.