Afternoon Everyone!

I run a few servers using Red Hat Enterprise 3, and need an opinion what Linux distro to run locally at home to expand my skill set without putting my "production" boxes in harms way.
Ideally, I would like something similiar to what is being run on my servers, any comments on using Fedora?

Any thoughts is appreciated...

I generally recommend avoiding Fedora for business use as, despite it's widespread use on machines by previous RH users it is a development platform and hence (imho) unpredictable. As a system for learning more on a personal machine it should be adequate.

CentOS is supposed to be a good RHE clone but not having used it I cannot comment one way or the other, but it may be the closest to your actualy production environment.

You do realize that RHE is available for download from RedHat for free? You just don't get the tech support and any proprietary utils that may come with the commercial version.

A friend has recently tried Ubuntu and said it's the easiest Linux he's ever used but I haven't tried it yet so that comment is only second hand. For a commercially packaged desktop solution, SuSE is also a decent choice.

I use Slackware on my personal machines, though I do still have a Debian box. My personal servers run FreeBSD with OpenBSD on the firewall/bastion host.

Lots of options, and what works well for me may not be suitable for you.

Try CentOS. It's RHEL without the commercial packages and RH support. It should be very close to your actual environment. If it's not to your tastes, try Whitebox. It's similar to RHEL, but has a totally different community following it.

If I could suggest... Try looking at MEPIS (http://www.mepis.org/). I have been using it for a while on a laptop and am growing quite fond of it.

It is worth a look...

Plus, you can download a "Live" iso image and run it from the disk without actually installing it. Nice feature when you just want to look at what it is capable of.

Steve...

I'm going to vote for Slackware 10.1 | but I also still use Redhat 9.0 since I tend to compile all internet facing daemons from scratch so I don't have to worry all that much about expired software. Or I may have just lulled myself into a false sense of security in that regard. :)

I would recommand that you use Debian Sarge, as it has just been frozen since the 3rd of this month. It has enough stuff in already to do hosting, and Debian has always been a good source with nice security updates. Just forget about all those RPM based distro. They are for newbies, not professionals. (IMHO, even the RPM format itself is really bad, and I HATE writting spec files).

Thomas

hey gplhost ? do you know if recent debian versions have yet implemented an automated installer similar to what redhat or slackware have? also, can it install directly onto software RAID1 disk sets or do you have to install to a single disk still and then build the raid set later?

I was working with Debian for a little while but due to the lack of these features I stopped using it. But I figure at some point they will implement this and I will give Debian another try.

The new installer is really nice, even if it's still text based. Do you care about the LOOK of the distro installer? I don't. I only care it's efficient. It has RAID setup at installation, and it's a lot easyer to use.

There is only one thing I'm worrying about. Is update from Woody to Sarge with RAID1 a problem, or will it do it safely? Did some of you test it? I'll have to, sooner or later...

Thomas

Originally posted by gplhost
The new installer is really nice, even if it's still text based. Do you care about the LOOK of the distro installer? I don't. I only care it's efficient. It has RAID setup at installation, and it's a lot easyer to use.


No I don't care about the look of the installer. Actually what I am looking for is something like redhats "kickstart" capability. So basically I put a text file on a floppy that contains all of the installation instructions, networking, packages, etc. Then I hit "go" and I come back an hour later and redhat has completely installed itself to my specifications. Slackware has something similar.

Does anyone know if Debian has implemented something like this recently? Last time I checked was about a year ago and they didn't have anything like this.

But that is good news about the raid setup during installation. They are making good progress.

dpkg -l >save_your_package_list.txt

I don't remember the way to do the restor.

By the way, I know there is a way to modify installer to have all the stuff you want automaticaly. I just don't know how... Debian guys had put a very huge effort on that new installer, you should give it a try!

Thomas