Re: Best OS for Postgres 8.2

On Mon, 7 May 2007, David Levy wrote:

> I am hesitating between Fedora Core 6, CentOS and Debian. Can anyone
> help with this ?

Debian packages PostgreSQL in a fashion unique to it; it's arguable
whether it's better or not (I don't like it), but going with that will
assure your installation is a bit non-standard compared with most Linux
installas. The main reasons you'd pick Debian are either that you like
that scheme (which tries to provide some structure to running multiple
clusters on one box), or that you plan to rely heavily on community
packages that don't come with the Redhat distributions and therefore would
appreciate how easy it is to use apt-get against the large Debian software
repository.

Given the buginess and unexpected changes from packages updates of every
Fedora Core release I've ever tried, I wouldn't trust any OS from that
line to run a database keeping track of where my socks are at. Core 6
seems better than most of the older ones. I find it hard to understand
what it offers that Centos doesn't such that you'd want Fedora instead.

Centos just released a new version 5 recently. It's running a fairly
modern kernel with several relevant performance improvements over the much
older V4; unless you have some odd piece of hardware where there is only a
driver available for Centos 4 (I ran into this with a disk controller),
the new version would better.

The main advantages of Centos over the other two are that so many people
are/will be running very similar configurations that you should able to
find help easily if you run into any issues. I revisited fresh installs
of each recently, and after trying both I found it more comfortable to run
the database server on Centos, but I did miss the gigantic and easy to
install Debian software repository.

--
* Greg Smith gsmith(at)gregsmith(dot)com http://www.gregsmith.com Baltimore, MD