Re: Linux distro

On 8/1/07, Madison Kelly <linux(at)alteeve(dot)com> wrote:
> Joseph S wrote:
> > I just moved one of my desktops and my laptop from Fedora 6 to Unbuntu
> > 7.04 because Fedora lacked hardware support that Unbuntu and my Fedora
> > machines had all sorts of problems like sound dropping out and machines
> > locking up. (Also the Fedora installers are terrible).
> >
> > My small gripes about Ubuntu are:
> > 1) rpm, for all its faults, is still better than using apt
>
> Heh, see, this is what I meant by "you won't get the same answer twice".
> :) Personally, one of the big selling features of Debian (and Ubuntu)
> was how much better /I/ found 'apt-get'/'aptitude'/'synaptic' over
> 'up2date'/'yum'.
>
> You may want to download all the popularly recommended distributions and
> play around with them to see which suits your fancy.
>
> The major distributions I would suggest (in no particular order) you
> play with:
> - RHEL (if you can afford it)
> - CentOS
> - Debian

Seconded.

I would tend to choose a distro based on who I know that I trust to
help me out. If you've got a good friend who is an RHCE, it might be
a good idea to go with RHEL/Centos. And so on.

Let me add. If you're going to be using this server in production,
it's just as important to stress / load test it before sending it out
to do the job to make sure it can, in fact, do the job.

memtest86 is a must, as is running some kind of heavy load test for a
few days or weeks if you can afford the time.

Get a good reliable RAID card, pref with battery backed cache.

And the point of this little side line is that whatever you choose for
hardware may well constrain what distro to use, as you'll need to make
sure the drivers that come with the distros works well with your
hardware.