Re: Linux distro

paolo(at)ecometer(dot)it wrote:
> Hello,
>
> I bought a Dell server and I am going to use it for installing PostgrSQL
> 8.2.4. I always used Windows so far and I would like now to install a
> Linux distribution on the new server. Any suggestion on which distribution
> ? Fedora, Ubuntu server, Suse or others?
>
> Thanks in advance,
> Paolo Saudin

First, let me echo Hannes; You do not want to go into production with a
network operating system you are not familiar with! Doing so is just
begging for down time. Unless this is a server you will have time to
learn on and/or you have someone with a Linux background to help you,
stick with MS for now.

With that caveat out of the way, Linux as a server is amazing! I, too,
was a MS-kids from way back (DOS5.2). I switched about five years ago to
Linux (RH5.2, coincidently) and honestly have never looked back. It's my
servers OS, my desktop OS and my laptop OS. It is very much worth the
learning curve from a sysadmin and stability point of view. You just
need to give yourself time to feel it out.

As for which distro; that's a question you are likely to never get the
same answer twice. :)

/Personally/, I love Debian on servers.

It's not quite as 'hardcore' as Gentoo (a great distro, but not one to
start with!). It's the foundation of many of the popular distros
(Ubuntu, Mepis, Knoppix, etc) and the Debian crew is very careful about
what they put into the 'stable' repositories. I had been a Redhat/FC fan
from when I first switched to Linux until v7.3 (the best version Redhat
ever put out, in my opinion). After v8 though, things went south... Too
many "Redhatisms" in the Redhat derivative distros (Fedora Core, RHEL,
CentOS, etc) reminded me of the reasons why I left Windows.

On desktops though I am a big fan of Ubuntu. Oddly though, I found the
6.x series less than great, and have found 7.04 to be *way* better. I
run it on my desktops and my laptop. I also had the problem with my main
desktop's widescreen, but that seems to be a Linux-wide issue. The fix
is easy if you know how to edit '/etc/X11/xorg.conf' (in my case, change
the '1440x1440' entries to '1440x900' and restart 'gdm'), but that would
be troublesome for people new to Linux.

Ubuntu is a great desktop... My boyfriend's 83yo grandma uses it with no
problems. I've moved several people over to the recent Ubuntu versions
and have yet to have any ask to go back to Windows. They've all had
nothing but compliments for it. It's just not a great server OS, as
Kenneth explained.

IANAL, YMMV, etc... :)

Madison